As some of you know I’ve moved to Taiwan since my last post, and while spending time out here I have learned that being w3c compliant is a MUST. Validation help ensure your website can be seen by web browsers of any type, including mobile users (it may not be pretty but it wont be broken).

The Firefox add-on “Developers Tool Bar ” can help you be

1. standards compliant
2. css error free
3. javascript error free

But if you really want to be proud of your work, you need to go that extra mile, spend that extra time to ensure that your site is w3c compliant. If your looking for the validation? Shoot on over to their website and test your pages for yourself.

• XHTML Validation
• CSS Validation

If your valid you can stick one of those stickers onto your site letting people know.

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Download Here

1920 x 1200 (widescreen)
1600 x 1200
1280 x 800 (widescreen)
1024 x 768

Please comment on the design, or link me to some of your own examples!

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Problem

I needed to add the post picture stored in a custom field to my header only on the post when its called.

Information

If you guys are already familiar with wordpress in any sort of way then you will know that the single.php will handle any calls of your posts. but it also handles categories or groups of posts that are called.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis was that i could run an if statement that would test and see if it was using single.php and if it was in the specific category i want the picture applied to (in my case the only categorized with post pictures is my blog).

my statement was something like this

<php if (is_single() && in_category(‘blog’))
echo ‘content ‘;
} ?>

Solution

Although my initial hypothesis was nearly correct or at least the logic was correct it wasn’t working for some reason, the wordpress template tag for in_category was pulling no results at any time. And I believe this was because this statement was completely out of the loop being in the header and all it didn’t quite know what post it was suppose to call to be in a category or not. Any ways after trying to take a nap later that day the simple solution came to me and ended up as such.

<?php if (is_single()) {
if (!is_category()) {
echo ‘content’;
}
} ?>

Instead of testing if it’s in a category I only needed to test to see if it was displaying a category page or not, This would eliminate my border on category pages, but keep them on all my post pages, the next and last step would be to create a default image for the categories where there is no post image. Ill post on this later.

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Creating and Styling our first theme from scratch.

CSS Styles

In order to get our new style to accept and read our new css style sheet we have to configure just a few comments.

like below

/*
Theme Name: cssOrigins.com
Description: the second iteration of the cssOrigins website
Author: Hunter  Brelsford
Author URI: http://www.cssOrigins.com
version: 1.0
Tags: Design, WordPress, Css
Optimization: Css Optimization done by Hunter  Brelsford 4/23/09
*/

Make sure at this point we save our style sheet. The style sheet fortunately is ready to be read in by our new blog, even though it does not contain any kind of actual style information. All plugins, and stylesheets in wordpress are detected this way, and auto generated into their respective themes, and plugins sections under the admin panel.

If we go on over to see our new theme, we can see that unfortunately that its listed as a broken theme.

Index.php

The reason we have a broken theme is because we have no files other then the style sheet associated with our theme, wordpress needs at least one for it to recognize its theme as a valid workable theme. So we will indulge it by creating a new file and naming it “index.php ”

1. create a index.php
2. add a title
3. save the page

if you want to add your own screen shot for your theme you can additionally upload a 4×3 .jpg up to your themes directory.

Template Tags – 10:05

WordPress has many built in functions that you can use on your site. the ones used in this screen cast are covered and defined here.

1. bloginfo(‘name’)  – Uses the name of your blog thats been defined in your wordpress settings
2. bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’) – Uses the current URL where your activated themes stylesheet is located
3. language_attributes(”) – Gives the default language and type direction of the wordpress instalation
4. bloginfo(‘html_type’) – Gives the page content type
5. bloginfo(‘charset’) – Displays the character set of the page

Template tags are nothing more then php functions in wordpress, these tags are available to access functions and variables from within wordpress.

More information on template tags can be found on the wordpress codex

This article was originally brought to you by Drew Douglass at ThemeForest

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The series will be separated into days, starting with day two… ok lets get started.

Day 2 : WordPress Admin panel.

Introduction

In our video here we quickly reviewed all the necessaries that we would be using in order to use and edit our new WordPress install. He quickly went over the WordPress file structure. The necessary changes that needed to be made to the wp-config.php file when we upload, and the location of our all important theme files.

www.example.com/wp-content/themes/theme1

Body

Moving on through the video the main bulk of this video was getting the understanding of the different template files in your wordpress theme, what they do and how they work, so lets move through a few of them.

As described in our video if we go to APPEARANCE | EDITOR we will be able to see all the template files included in the wordpress theme currently activated.

If we start by importance usualy index.php would come to mind in a wordpress site. We can see there’s no doctypes or much html data in our file at all, but rather many simple php requests to header and footer and sidebar etc.. These are essentially statements that calls in those files from you directory. So header.

In our header.php we find our doctypes and titles tags and start of our html elements. This is loaded at the top of every page or post that calls get_header(). Pretty easy to understand.

Similarly our files typically end with out get_footer() call and our footer.php contains all the closing tags for information contained within our document.

Single.php – used for individual post pages.

404.php – used when a page within your wordpress blog cannot be found.

Sidebar -  calls widgets and other custom information into the 1 or more sidebars in your wordpress theme.

Conclusion

After looking through and familiarizing yourself with the themes directory withing your wordpress install you should be able to identify the different files and what they more or less accomplish. With this basic knowledge we will be able to simply identify where and what files we need to be editing in the future while we move on to developing our own theme, in the new few videos.

If you’re having problems understand the videos or information please comment and we will see if we can help you out.

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First SEO Quake found at seoquake.com

Seo quake is both for Firefox and IE, and its primary function in is to help quantitatively define the information presented on a website or page being viewed. The main feature I would point you guys too is the keyword density ability, basically it can read through your pages and find out how many times a word or group of words appears on your site. VERY HANDY if your going for SEO optimizations this is a must, try and get your good key words between 5-20 density for maximum effect on your home page.

Next we have the all powerful Developers toolbar from Chris Derick

The toolbar can be downloaded from addons.mozilla.org

Developers tool bar is a multifunction toolbar allowing users to view style information, edit css, outline styles, edit their browsers width and height and so much more. Just with those key features makes the developers toolbar the #1 Firefox extension any kind of web personnel should have. Being able to specifically target a browsers width and height is something I think we all have had to do at a specific time, and with 2 clicks boom you can view the site in that exact resolution.

Being able to edit css on the fly even on another website and save it off also a helpful or potentially a time saving feature. and of course most praised feature in my opinion is the ability to highlight hovered objects, and see their css roots. See what div, what class and what id they came from, makes editing your styles that must faster.

Umm lets see, Colorzilla downloadable over there colorzilla.com !!

Colorzilla is simple, it places an icon down in the lower left hand corner status bar and  you just select it to get an eye dropper in Firefox, thus allowing you to retrieve any color on the firefox screen. Oh its sOo handy.

Finally we have Firebug available addons.mozilla.org

Firebug has some similarities with the developers toolbar but its a lot more complex. In other words it can be used to help diagnose css related issues and help you dig deep to find what id or class your having trouble with, but where this thing has shined for me in the past is with the development of dynamic sites, the ability to track what files are specifically slowing down the loading or display of my site.

My list of Firefox plug-in’s again are

• SEO quake
• Developers toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Firebug
• and of course Firefox is the browser.

Do you  have your own plug-in you think should be included in this, feel free to comment and let everyone know about it.

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Before

Completely unsure about how good bots scan and index files and sites, myself and other bloggers alike had come up with a million different ways to present their own robots.txt file, and a million more ways to do theirs if they where using a wordpress site.

they ranged from

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /
Disallow: *

to something similar to this.

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /wp*

After

Some of what we have in our typical robots.txt is indeed valid, but bear with me for a second as i explain what i did to come up with some new results.

to gather statistics on what was being indexed I cross referenced the results from some analytic tools that I had available.

1. Google analytics (google search stats)
   
2. Stat press (wordpress stats)
   
3. awstats (server side built in stats)
4. Web mastering tools (By Google)
   

From the data I was able to pull from these resources I specifically looked for what was being hit. Because of the special way that wordpress loads, and imports I could see that /index.php was being indexed as a file, but most other FILES on the site where not indexed. All other PAGES or what would be considered a page by a typical computer user where not indexed as an actual FILE but rather indexed by its permalink location.

hmm … interesting Google bot indexes files and paths. Interesting  but not unexpected.

By now most of us know this, you set up a permalink structure in your website and it dynamically changes the links throughout your site to reflect the change. This is great for dynamically driven websites looking for a cleaner path or some SEO optimization.

The Google bot can in most cases follow an average custom permalink structure, I will note that the more difficult the permalink structures are ether crawled slower if crawled at all. I would shy away from lots of string names within your structure =?etc …

Back to robots…

So how does all this effect your robots.txt structure you ask? Well if you have gotten yourself a good permalink structure and you can then you can essentially set up your robots to block everything but the categories, pages, or posts you want it to crawl, and is perfect for helping eliminate duplicated content.

Here’s an example.

My own robots.txt file

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /category/archive/
Disallow: /feed/

I have disallowed my wp-admin directory, and a category in my wordpress permalink structure /category/archive, and finally disallowed my rss feeds, accessed through http://www.cssorigins.com/feed if my site was indexed properly by Google then all the content that would be in the feeds would already been indexed and thus the feeds would be duplicated content. The same goes for the archive category, since I post all my posts into that category as well as their individual categories.

But remember that the bots index files as well, so it would be a bad idea to do something similar to this.

Disallow: /*.php

as your index file now would not be indexed, along with the rest of your website. =(

Don’t understand? Think there’s a better way? Please comment and help us build a better understanding of how the web works.

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Note that this article takes at the bare minimal a basic programming understanding (ie what a variable is, and that code is logical)

The if () { }

if statements are great if your looking to target specific content with your dynamic values, for instance call a sidebar only on the home page.

<?php if (is_front_page()) {
get_sidebar();
} ?>

or if you would like to target multiple pages, its very similar

<?php if (is_page(’2,3,6,home’)) {
// do stuff here on those specific pages,
}

Outside the loop

Calling your own posts or categories

<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query(‘category_name=yourcategory&showposts=4′);
echo ‘<ul>’;
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
echo ‘<li> stuff goes here </li>’;

endwhile;
echo ‘</ul>’;
?>

Custom Fields

call your custom field right before you need it
$key=”yourcustomfield”;
then simply call echo the key like so
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);

a custom key can contain pictures, html, code.

HTML in php code

<?php echo ‘ <div>all this is html</div> ‘; ?>  make sure you end your echo quotes and use your semicolen to indicate the end of a statement. while everything else inside will be printed to the screen

Utilizing just these things can utterly unleash wordpress you will no longer be constrained to what you can put on your sidebar or you can hand craft your home page to pull posts from different sources. The possibilities are endless.

Some examples are as follow

1. dynamically add or remove the sidebar from a page or post
2. create custom banner images for each unique page
3. call post titles in your sidebar that relate to the one the user is currently looking at

All this and more while keeping your site still around 90% editable in the designers eye and easily manageable in the clients eye.

I would like to mention that since the best and easiest way for editing material in custom places is by calling the categories they are associated with. This in turn can leave you with many categories some of which the client should add and edit and others maybe not so much. But my point is that it’s important to document those things and provide them to the client at the completion of your contract. It’s a good practice and it covers your bases, and outlines what can and cannot be changed within their site if you “sold” them that ability in the first place.

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These first two are unlike the rest because they are logo and illustration galleries.

Logo Pond

Vecteezy

Mail Chimp

Silverback

Cult-Foo

Open Doors

Biola

Web Designer Depot

Agami Creative

Mochiads

Stoodeo

DallasISP

Sheye Rosemeyer

Gourmet Web Design

Indy List

Lucuma

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• The personal design blog, web.print.andbeyond  at Jilnteractive
• Gonno Design’s Dark theme focuses your attention to his work | Gonzo Design
• Web design company employing the funner side of illustration | GetMeFast
• Creepy animation, solid design skills | STPo
• A personal favorite, Abduzeedo links all of us to great inspiration over and over again | Abduzeedo
• Popular css gallery website | css Fresh Blend
• a UK biased company, and not so known in my circles but a very beautiful css Gallery | CSS Showcase
• Theme forest home page is what makes this site wonderful, pictures, content, nice big power button | Theme Forest
• The ever popular Smash Magazine

If you have comments about this list please feel free to leave them. This list is comprised almost in its entirety by my own personal feelings about these websites look and feels.

Additionally if your interested in a larger list studio7designs has come up with a list of 101 sites most of whitch are simply stunning. A list that I myself with be reviewing in great depth in the comeing weeks. The Additional list can be found at http://www.studio7designs.com/blog/101-design-resource-links/ and will be added to my news press section.

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