Notes on the 2010 WordPress Theme

Here are some of my random thoughts after going through the files of the new TwentyTen (2010) theme which will be introduced in WordPress 3.0.

header.php isn’t poetry at all

The content of the <title> should be generated within functions.php by using the wp_title filter, so that plugins and users can overwrite it. In header.php we would have only:

<title><?php wp_title('|', true, 'right'); ?></title>

and in functions.php something like:

add_filter('wp_title', 'twentyten_title', 10, 2);

function twentyten_title($title, $sep) {
	global $post;

	$title = wptexturize($title);
	$page_no = get_query_var('paged');

	if (is_front_page())
		$title = get_bloginfo('title') . ' ' . $sep . ' ' . get_bloginfo('description');
	elseif (!is_feed())
		$title .= ' ' . get_bloginfo('title');

	if ($page_no > 1)
		$title .= ' (page ' . $page_no . ')';

	return $title;
}

Theme’s stylesheet style.css should be loaded after the wp_head() call, so that users can overwrite styles added by the plugins. Read more »

The Magic of Software (Licensing)

Henry Birdseye: “Is it getting to the point where the software is going to cost as much as the machine?”

Unknown: “I think it will get to that, yes.”

Birdseye: “So, if something like that can cost so much. Why not just make your copy?”

Bill Gates: “If you don’t get a legitimate copy, you won’t be… came aware of the improvements, and… overall the impact that type of ripoff is going to have is that people won’t write quality packages.”

Unknown: “It takes time to write software. We haven’t found any way to really reduce that time. It takes time to define the problem. It takes time to write the software.”

Henry Birdseye: “But increasingly, as you begin to (medal?) with the prepackaged things and get a little experience, you just can’t resist the temptation to do some of your own programming. And people are gonna be doing that.”

Bill Gates: “There’s a lot of people who are forcasting that there’ll be software stores just like there are record stores today and that there’ll be thousands and thousands of those, and I think I have to agree with that.”

And yet, 86-DOS — the operating system which Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen pitched and later licensed to IBM — was actually written by Tim Paterson and called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Read more »

The Unspoken Heroes of Web Design

While playing with the typography of this blog, I couldn’t appreciate enough the simplicity and elegance of Tahoma, it’s wider sister Verdana and beauty serif Georgia. All of those fonts were designed by one guy — Matthew Carter, English type designer born 1937, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

Matthew Carter

Thomas Rickner

While you have probably heard of Matthew Carter, it’s unlikely that you’ll know Tom Rickner who hinted these fonts making them so easy to read at sizes with very few ink dots available to form their shape and guide the eye.

In the summer of 1994 Microsoft commissioned Carter and Rickner to design a new system font for Windows 95 which we now know as Tahoma. Here is the story of Verdana.

Once you’ll discover where the names of those fonts come from, you’ll never look at them the same way.

— § / Add a Comment

Smarter Cleaner Gallery

Justin Tadlock’s Cleaner Gallery plugin fixes the semantics of the WordPress built-in gallery feature by placing all of the gallery related CSS in an external file instead of the inline CSS produced by WordPress core.

However, the problem is that this CSS file is loaded on every page request. Therefore, until WordPress supports combining all CSS files into one, here is a quick way to hide this CSS file on all pages that don’t contain a gallery (line 128 of cleaner-gallery.php):

Note: this will add cleaner-gallery.css only on single post and page views (not indexes or archives).

add_action('wp_head', 'cleaner_gallery_head', 0);
function cleaner_gallery_head() {
	global $post;
	if (strstr($post->post_content, '[gallery'))
		wp_enqueue_style( 'cleaner-gallery', CLEANER_GALLERY_URL . '/cleaner-gallery.css', false, 0.7, 'all' );
}

Hopefully, Justin can incorporate this into the next release of this handy plugin.

— § / 8 comments, add yours

Automatically Escape HTML Entities of Code Fragments in Comments

Update: Ryan has made this into a plugin — Code Comments.

Add this to your theme’s functions.php to allow readers post fragments of code in their comments (wrapped in <code>...</code>) which are automatically encoded (think of < and <)

add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'encode_code_in_comment');

function encode_code_in_comment($source) {
  $encoded = preg_replace_callback('/<code>(.*?)<\/code>/ims',
  create_function(
    '$matches',
    '$matches[1] = preg_replace(
        array("/^[\r|\n]+/i", "/[\r|\n]+$/i"), "",
        $matches[1]);
      return "<code>" . htmlentities($matches[1]) . "</code>";'
  ),
  $source);

  if ($encoded)
    return $encoded;
  else
    return $source;
}

Worth noting:

• Everything wrapped in <code>...</code> is encoded.
• Line breaks after opening <code> and before closing </code> are removed in order to avoid unnecessary <br /> tags.

— § / 7 comments, add yours

Multiple Galleries per Post/Page

Ever wanted to have multiple galleries on the same post or page? Currently most of the solutions require you to manually edit gallery shortcode and add something like include="img_id_1 img_id2". Luckily, WordPress 2.9 will have this include/exclude feature built in core, but you still don’t have an easy way to select images which to include or to insert multiple galleries.

Therefore, I created a plugin called Multiple Galleries which adds checkboxes next to images in the Insert Gallery window which makes selecting images to be included in galleries fast and easy. If no checkbox is selected, all images are included.

I created this plugin because I am designing a new WordPress theme for designers, artists, architects and all of the creative types where the ability to have multiple galleries per portfolio entry is very important.

— § / 12 comments, add yours

Enable Automatic Updates for Plugins Hosted by Developers

Currently WordPress doesn’t offer an easy way for plugins which are not hosted on wordpress.org to use its built-in automatic update feature.

Fortunately, I have found a quick and simple way to add this functionality to any plugin and allow plugin authors to take a complete control over when and how the updates are released. Read more »