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 »

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 »

Proprietary vs. Liberal vs. GNU GPL

This is a response to an article written by Daniel Jalkut, titled Getting Pretty Lonely.

I think there is one critical point that we all should agree on — developers like to be compensated for their work, even those of Open Source and Free Software.

Some assume that GNU GPL makes it almost impossible or at least very hard to earn fair compensation for time invested in developing the software, while “Liberal” licences allow the freedom to determine (and guarantee) the compensation through controlling the distribution.

The reason for this is the current implementation of the competition-driven capitalism which has made the concepts of donation and freedom to compensate completely bizarre in the context of how businesses work these days. Read more »