Ravael Angeline has a tutorial posted on WP.Tutsplus.com that covers the basics of a header.php file. This particular file is located in every WordPress theme and is essential to how a theme works. Also worthy of reading following the tutorial is a comment by Tom McFarlin. ∞
The Header Won’t Be Changing In 2.8
The results for the WordPress design challenge poll are in and it looks like the dark fluency style has emerged as the winner. But as Jane mentions in the official blog post, the results are interesting. Overall, the various Fluency variations made up for a large majority of the votes but on the flipside, the choice for keeping the current implementation came out in second place which is definitely something worth noting.
According to Jane, the current implementation will remain the same in WordPress 2.8 however, a new header design will be worked on for WordPress 2.9 so that enough time can be given to perform usability testing.
As I went through and voted, I can’t say any particular design attracted me more so then the others. I think I spent about 5-7 minutes reviewing each design never having a concrete decision on which one I wanted. In the end, I chose Fluency Style, Medium. But you know, I thought about it and I don’t use the header area that much anyways. The only time I actually use the header is to click on the VISIT SITE link. What about you? How often do you find yourself clicking around in the header area and which version did you vote for?
Vote For The New Header Design
Pretty awesome to see that in such a short notice, there were ten different header tweaks submitted including one by Kaspars Dambis. I placed my vote early this morning but I followed Janes instructions in opening each full view screenshot in a browser tab and viewing each one. I must have looked at all of them for about 7 minutes without any of them screaming out at me. I finally placed my vote and I’ll just say it was for a design tweak other than the current one.
One interesting thing to note is that when I voted, the second most voted for choice in the poll was to keep the current header design.
Have your say in the header design tweak before the poll closes tonight at 8PM EDT.
Hasty Mistake With WP2.8 Header Design Challenge
Jeremy Visser published what I believe to be a great post regarding the recent WordPress 2.8 header design challenge which took place this past weekend. In his post, Jeremy discusses the fact that the challenge requires entrants to work from a .PSD file which is a proprietary format tied to Adobe Photoshop, a program which costs hundreds of dollars and is not readily available to use by everyone within the WordPress community.
So because I choose to use free software for my day-to-day tasks which is morally better and technically superior (SVG is much better for such mockups), I and hundreds of other WordPress contributors would be unable to submit my designs for the competition because of the simple fact that they choose to be locked into a proprietary format.
In response to Jeremy’s post, Matt Thomas who created the mockup design in the first place responded to the criticism in a comment left on the post. Granted the challenge was created virtually without notice. If there had been more time, I think Matt Thomas and company would have opened up the challenge to more formats just as long as they preserved the layers and could be edited in Photoshop which is what they plan on doing in the future.
I think Jeremy did a great job with his post raising this issue as it flew right by me after reading the initial challenge announcement. I’m also enlightened to see folks such as Jeremy keeping a watchful eye on everything the WordPress project/Automattic does to see if it falls out of line with the open-source mantra. In the end, I think this was all just a hasty mistake. What do you think?
Jeremy said something in his post that I think could be turned into one of those motivational posters you see in corporate offices regarding open-source projects.
Do not alienate the community that gives you your very existence.