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Notes on the 2010 WordPress Theme

Feb 24, 2010 WordPress 15 comments

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 »

15 Comments

Remove index.html from the URL

Feb 22, 2010 Web Design 4 comments

Some servers seem to automatically append index.html to all HTTP requests, which you can remove by placing this at the beginning of .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On # remove this, if you have it already

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} index\.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

I used this technique for a site that I built — ichomesforsale.com which is hosted at Godaddy.

4 Comments

The Magic of Software (Licensing)

Feb 22, 2010 Free Software

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 »

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The Unspoken Heroes of Web Design

Feb 17, 2010 Web Design 1 comment

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.

Portrait of Matthew Carter

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.

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