Author: Tom (Page 278 of 428)

The Third Version of Live Theme For WordPress

April 3, 2014 / Tom

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About four years ago, I had the pleasure of working with a team to help deliver the first iteration of Live Theme for WordPress; however, as the team leaned out, changed directions, and paired down our product focus, we sold the product to someone else for continued development and maintenance.

To make a somewhat long (perhaps even boring) story short, I’m currently working on the third version of Live Theme for WordPress.

How to Set an SMTP Server in WordPress

April 2, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to sending emails in WordPress, the wp_mail function and its related filters such as wp_mail_content_type, wp_mail_from, and wp_mail_from_name are usually enough to accomplish the majority of what we need.

But there are times where it’s not enough. Specifically, there are times where we may need to define the details for using a custom SMTP server in WordPress.

Fortunately, WordPress provides a hook that makes this really easy to do.

How Not To Market WordPress Products (or “Why Customers Don’t Care”)

April 1, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re any sort of a WordPress developer, then one of the things that you’ve no doubt noticed is how we market our work.

I’d say that it can be divided into two camps:

You have the developers who promote the features, design, and options that the theme or plugin offers.
You have the developers who promote all of the things that have gone into the theme as to what makes it significant.

When it comes to marketing WordPress themes or plugins (or any product, for that matter), then the first group has it absolutely correct.

The second group, on the other hand, can take a few cues from the first group – namely, stop trying to market your WordPress products based on the tools and technology that were used when working on the project.

Dealing with Custom Post Types, Taxonomies, and Permalinks

March 31, 2014 / Tom

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One of the most confusing aspects of working with WordPress is managing its rewrite rules. For anyone who has taken a dive into the Rewrite API and looked at how it works, and how to customize it to fit your own needs can vouch for this.

Honestly, if you’ve ever done any work with custom post types, taxonomies, and permalinks and worked with the rewrite parameter (or perhaps have left it out), then you’ve experienced a little bit of the confusion (or frustration, perhaps) that can come with it.

For those who have been wrestling specifically with the latter, I wrote up a short guide for making sense of this occasionally confusing aspect of WordPress.

An Example of How To Remove Empty HTML Tags

March 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the most tedious aspects of building WordPress themes is customizing and styling the comments template. This includes not only the comment form and the pingbacks, but the response text, as well.

Don’t get me wrong: It could be worse, and after you’ve done it a few times, it’s likely that you’re going to use many of the same strategies that you’ve used in previous themes or templates.

But there are examples in which certain elements will render as empty HTML tags. If you have given those tags a specific, say, background style then it can really create somewhat of an ugly experience for your readers.

The challenge, then, comes at being able to remove empty elements before the user can see them. But there’s a catch: It can’t be done on the server side because the server side sees the HTML as you would expect it to be rendered whereas the browsers take the liberty of parsing the document and adjusting the markup so that it’s a bit more semantic.

At least that’s what most of them try to do.

Anyway, this can cause some unintended side-effects.