By Jeffro on May 20, 2010
I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this before, a WordPress theme that has a 3-Dimensional post view. Nathan Barry over at LegendThemes has a screencast available showing off the theme in action with rotating post views and the different ways of viewing a post. Unfortunately, this theme is heavily dependent on the type of browser you’re using due to the use of CSS3. According to Nathan, only the most recent versions of Safari fully supports it.
Note: the 3D and animation only work in recent versions of Safari. Though the site does degrade gracefully in other, less capable browsers. Update: Only Safari in Snow Leopard can fully run this demo. Unfortunately preserve-3d doesn’t appear to be supported in Safari Windows or in Chrome on any platform.
Since I don’t use Safari on my desktop, I was not able to check out the 3-D goodness. Would be cool for FireFox to support the various 3D Transforms in CSS3. In fact, it would be awesome if all of the major browsers supported it so we could see themes innovate the ways in which content could be viewed and interacted with.
Posted in Themes | Tagged 3d, css, legend, theme, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 26, 2009
As most of you are aware, I ended up choosing to edit a child theme of the Theme Hybrid framework called Hybrid News. Out of the gate, using a child theme that is built on top of a framework certainly has a learning curve. For instance, if I installed a plugin where the directions told me to place a line of code in a certain theme template file, I couldn’t do that in this child theme since it’s primary purpose is to be compiled mostly of CSS without touching the core of the framework which holds the theme together.
Instead, it’s up to me to figure out how to add that plugins code to my child themes functions.php file. Something which requires I as an end user to know about filters, hooks, or other weird developing terms. In this instance, I believe child themes have raised the technical bar. I know if I put in a support query, Justin will be right there to answer it but I feel like a loony for having to rely on support in order to accomplish something which was easy before hand. I know some would argue that functions of a plugin should be added to a custom functions.php anyway to prevent it disappearing if a theme upgrade were to occur.
Other than this hurdle, I don’t have much to complain about. The experience has gone over rather well and it was nice to just edit the CSS of a theme for once without having to edit 5 separate template pages.
So should their be an easier way to customize where and when a plugins output will show up in a theme by implementing an interface of sorts for these plugin functions or should I just buckle down and learn a thing or two regarding functions.php, hooks, filters, and those other funky terms?
Posted in Themes | Tagged child themes, code, css, editing |
By Jeffro on May 9, 2009
If you’ve read a guest post on this site recently, you may have noticed a special block I created just for them which is styled differently than the rest of the post. The block contains information about the author of the post, an avatar image and a link to the URL of their choosing. This way, I give the reader clear indication that the post they are reading is not mine. I know you’re just dieing to see how I accomplished this little feat so let’s get onto the code snippets.
Back in late April, I inquired on the forum if anyone had any experience or plugin suggestions regarding highlighting guest blog post authors. I was hoping to find a plugin that would add a div box which pulled in a users gravatar via their email address while I manually filled out the content in each post. I didn’t come across anything like that but thanks to the members of the forum, they offered a way in which I could add some CSS to my themes style sheet and then wrap the guest author content within that Div class so it would be styled accordingly.
Here is the CSS code I added to me theme.
.guestposter {
border: 1px solid #dddddd;
padding-bottom: 16px;
display: block;
margin-bottom: 20px;
font-style:italic;
background: #E9E4D4;
}
.img-gravatar{
float:left;
margin-right: 10px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
}Once this was added to my style sheet, I was able to manually assign the guestposter class to a block of content which dealt with the guest post author.
<div class="guestposter"><img class="img-gravatar" src="link to the image" alt="alt text" title="titletext" width="50" height="50" />This is a guest blog post written by <strong>My WordPress</strong>, author of the blog, <a href="http://www.wordpress.org" target="_blank">WordPress</a>.</div>
Of course, just substitute the code with your own stuff and you should be all set. I don’t publish guest posts that often so copying and then pasting this code snippet isn’t too bad.
Posted in Blogging | Tagged css, guest posts, techniques, tricks |
By Jeffro on April 16, 2009
Today I wanted to talk about a problem which Justin Tadlock will be covering in more detail at some point in the future and that is, plugins which contain a CSS file to edit their style. Don’t get me wrong, Lester Chen is a great plugin author, but I find it increasingly annoying that after I make the necessary styling changes to his WP-PageNavi plugin so that it blends in with my theme, I overwrite those changes once I upgrade his plugin.
Based on what I’ve been told, it’s fairly easy to add a plugins stylesheet to your themes CSS file so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. But, I wanted to raise the question if whether or not plugins should come with their own CSS file for editing or just store the styling information in the database so that end users don’t have to worry about messing around with the CSS in the first place? I’m pretty sure this is how Lester’s WP-Polls plugin works as I can define from within the plugin options page which colors the voting bars should be via hexadecimal color codes.
What are the drawbacks to storing plugin style information in the database versus a CSS file? On the surface, seems like adding the style information right into the plugins options table in the database is A OK to do.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged css, database, Plugins, settings, style |
