The WPCandy post was advocating that theme designers should stop bundling WordPress plugins and other functionality which limits how easily users can switch themes, something which I feel is absolutely a good idea. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post — I want to focus specifically on the issue raised in the WPLift post — building plugins directly into themes.

The post shows you how to add the DP Twitter Widget into your theme; it’s literally a case of copying a pasting the plugin’s code into your functions.php. In fact it’s so easy that there’s no reason not to build every single widget and plugin you can think of under the sun into your theme, right?

Unfortunately it’s a little more complicated than that and for the rest of this post I’ll set out exactly why that’s the case.

Firstly, the second you build a plugin into your theme, you’re assuming responsibility and are obliged to support the plugin, so if anything breaks in future updates, you’ll need to be able to fix it. Say the plugin used Ben’s timthumb and updating was an absolute necessity, the onus would then be on you to provide the update by offering an entire theme upgrade rather than just a simple plugin update independent of the theme.

Second, what’s the point? The functionality you’re providing already exists and unless you’re significantly changing the plugin, I’m struggling to see the point of just duplicating functionality. Sure, you get to brag about how your theme has thousands upon thousands of built in widgets and it makes everything really fun and it’ll do everything you’ve ever wanted, but by just adding a plugin that already exists into your theme, you’re just adding something I can do already by installing plugins. Plus, I’ll not lose everything in two years when I decide I need to overhaul the look of my site! And hey, there are sites like mine out there which show you how to do things like building a WordPress powered email newsletter without plugins anyway!

I’m not just wagging fingers from the rooftops — this was a mistake I made when I launched my ill fated theme site, WPShift nearly two years ago. At the time having a ton of functionality in a theme was the way to go and we made a decision that we would go down the route of essentially just bundling plugins with the theme.

I’m glad to say this isn’t all the range any more, so please don’t do it, it’s just making a mess in the long run.

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• A practical theme framework that offers a solid starting point for any WordPress theme.
• Plug and play – works out of the box, with an extensive options page.
• Awesome SEO. Everyone talks about their theme having ‘awesome SEO’, but Biblioteca doesn’t just let you believe it, it has options for setting the post title and description.
• Featured content gallery – Biblioteca uses Chris Coyier’s jQuery slider.
• Extensive options page – pictured below, the options page lets you change a ton of options, from the width of the sidebar to the contents of the footer to the ads in the sidebar to your Analytics tracking code.
• Magazine look – you want a fancy featured content gallery? Biblioteca has one. Enable/disable it from the opions page.
• Tech blog look – you want a couple of posts featured below the main featured content gallery? Biblioteca has got one of them; it’s widgetised too.
• Bloggy look – you just want a blog? Biblioteca can do that as well. Just set the options in the options panel.
• Drop down navigation – Biblioteca has some rather nice drop down navigation.
• A ton of widgets – Biblioteca has an ever expanding number of widget ready areas in all sorts of places that allow you to easily pop text just about anywhere.
• Fancy footer – the three column footer here on WPShout is often complimented and you too can have one – Biblioteca has one which you can enable/disable from the options page.
• Auto image resizing – set an image to display on the homepage and it’ll automatically resize itself.
• Multiple layouts – through the options panel you can change the layout, having a thin main content area, a slightly larger main content area or an even bigger main content area.
• The list goes on – just download it and see for yourself!

When creating Biblioteca I wanted to make something that would allow me to rapidly develop future themes, something I’ve done. Whether that makes it a ‘framework’ or not I don’t know. What I do know is that if you’re a designer looking to create an awesome WordPress theme but you don’t want to start from scratch, you could do worse than base your theme on Biblioteca. If you’re not a developer, then by no means are you alienated from using Biblioteca; the advanced theme options and in-post SEO options make it a great choice for any blog – take a look at WPShout and you’ll see; pretty much all I’ve done is change the background on the theme.

As in accordance with WordPress itself, the theme is GPL, although offered ‘as is’ with no free support. You can see the theme live here and grab the download it here. Enjoy!

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Making the switch from blogger to  becoming a WordPress theme developer is something that a lot of people find a daunting prospect. And with good reason – all those bits of PHP, CSS, HTML! Scary stuff. But it needn’t be. And now it won’t be either:-

Last week on WPShout I ran “A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Theme Development“. It was more or less just about that – a guide for the beginner WordPress theme developer looking at all of the daunting and different theme files. The series ran over the whole of last week and today has reached its climax with the release of a free eBook which contains the whole series. Over the week, the series looked at all the aspects of a WordPress theme, starting with the fundamentals of any WordPress theme, next moving onto the index.php file. It then looks at the header, sidebar and footer files. Next was the single.php file and finally the other files a WordPress theme has.

The eBook is twenty one pages, 3,508 words and five chapters, with the table of contents as follows:

• Chapter 1: The fundamentals of any WordPress theme.
• Chapter 2: The index.php and style.css files.
• Chapter 3: The header, sidebar and footer.
• Chapter 4: The single, comments and page files.
• Chapter 5: The archive, home and functions files.

As I said, the eBook is free, so download it, soak up the information and become an awesome WordPress theme developer!

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Here’s a scenario: your post gets popular on Delicious. You get a ton of comments from “SEO BLOG TIPS”  saying “thanks for great post”. Comments like that add no value whatsoever to your blog post. Heck, they devalue it. So here’s the question: do you allow the comment or delete it?

Personally, I consider comments like that spam, but on the other hand, it does get the comment count up. So there it is. A short post, but there’s a reason for it; it’s meant to spark debate, so go on. What would you do?

(poll embedded)

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Yesterday on my blog, WPShout I published ‘10 Awesome Things to Do With WordPress’ Custom Fields‘. This morning I awoke to find not a single comment on the post. I was disappointed as the post had taken ages, but I didn’t think much more of it. Until this evening. I wanted to email a friend a link to the post, so I loaded up WPShout, only to find the post wasn’t there! In the admin was only my draft from a couple of days ago. Odd, I thought. I copied and pasted the post from Google Reader and republished the post. And then I realized that a heck of a lot of comments I’d spent yesterday evening replying to had gone, and so had my replies. In other words, my database had reverted to a version a couple of days old. Why? I don’t know (if anyone does have any idea, could you drop me an email?!) at this point.

Of course, at this point you’re (probably not) screaming at your monitor

“just restore the backup you’ve got!… you, you do have a backup, right?!”

Yes. Of course I did. Or so I thought. I’d set up the WordPress Database Backup plugin to email me a backup of the database every 24 hours, and that email automatically got archived. Which meant I didn’t see it hadn’t been sent for a couple of weeks because when moving domains I’d forgotten to reinstall the plugin. Which meant I didn’t have a backup.

Where this post is going is simple – don’t be an idiot like me and only realize your backup doesn’t exist when you actually need it, spend five minutes now installing the plugin I mention above and set it up to email you every day. Just don’t archive the email automatically. WordPress Hacks Top Tip: don’t be an idiot….always have a backup.

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1. First up, ‘10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks‘ on Smashing Magazine by Jean-Baptiste Jung of WP Recipes fame.
2. Next, a post on Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr’s Digging into WordPress caught my eye: ‘Include jQuery in WordPress (the right way)‘. In this post, as you might have guessed, Chris shows how to include jQuery the right way – using the copy of jQuery built into WordPress.
3. Third, a post on WPWebHost in two parts – ‘Securing your WordPress Install the Foolproof Way’ – parts one and two. A couple of tips in there that you might not have thought of.
4. Another post that caught my eye was ‘Multiple WordPress Loops Explained‘. I would say more, but it’s pretty self explanatory.
5. A post that has been around a while, but is worth mentioning anyway – WPCandy presents ’10 Things You Can Do With WordPress Besides Blogging‘. Again, pretty self explanatory, but definately worth a look.
6. And finally, a little plug for a post I wrote the other day – ‘10 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme‘. Check it out. Some rather nice tips in there.

And there we have it. Six links of note!  Add your own in the comments.

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How do you do it? First log in, on the sidebar select ‘Media’ (which is under ‘Settings’). You’ll then be taken to a page with an option to change the thumbnail size of images. Change that to whatever size you want your images to appear as. Next, insert the code below onto your homepage, archive page, whatever.

<?php
//Get images attached to the post
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'attachment',
'post_mime_type' => 'image',
'numberposts' => -1,
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_status' => null,
'post_parent' => $post->ID
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
if ($attachments) {
foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
$img = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $attachment->ID );
break; }
//Display image
} ?>


Then, to display your image you can just echo out the $img tag we just created:

<img src="<?php echo $img; ?>" alt=" " />

And there we have it. I told you it was easy! This is one of the tips from a post I wrote yesterday on WPShout – ‘10 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme‘.

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After Kyle announced in his last post that he would not be able to resume WPHacks’ regular posting schedule for awhile, I volunteered to step up to the plate; for the next fortnight I’ll be taking Kyle’s place and plan to be posting at least once every other day!

Me.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m Alex Denning. I’ve written the odd post here on WordPress Hacks, as well as occasionally writing posts for CatsWhoCode and ProBlogDesign. Recently I started my own WordPress blog, WPShout.com, and I also am the editor of Nometet.com.  I’m on Twitter too!

What I’ll be posting

As I said, I’ll be posting at least once every other day with a bit of discussion, some nice WordPress hacks, some WordPress news, etc. However, I haven’t got enough post ideas for the entire two weeks; any suggestions for posts would be greatly appreciated in the comments.

A quick plug

As with everything in life, my posting here does too have an ulterior motive; I’ve briefly mentioned my blog already, but I’ll expand: my blog has just (I say just, ie today!) changed its name from Nometech.com to WPShout.com and it has also got an exciting new design. As you’re reading WordPress Hacks, that implies you’re a WordPress fan, so I’ll make a quick prod in the direction of the WPShout RSS feed; a couple of times a week I publish in depth posts related to WordPress. I’d hope the content speaks for itself, so go take a look!

Wrapping up

I think that’s everything! As I said, any post suggestions or questions?  Please do leave a comment below, and here’s to an excellent next two weeks!

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What on earth are you going on about?! I’ll go back a step. You’ve probably got some idea what BuddyPress is and will have heard about it, but chances are you don’t really know what it is exactly. Well, in a nutshell, BuddyPress turns your WPMU (the version of WordPress that allows you to have multiple blogs, i.e. the software WordPress.com uses)  installation and turns it into a fully functional social network! In other words (from BuddyPress.org):

BuddyPress will add a social networking layer to a new or existing installation of WordPress MU. BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

But WordPress MU isn’t as popular as WordPress.org… No. It’s not, which is probably one of the reasons that a version of BuddyPress for the standard install of WordPress is in the works. There’s no official release date yet, but word on the.. er… web. is that it’ll be available in a couple of months. Taking a step back here, how awesome would that be! For those of you who have multiple writers or even just readers signing up on your blog, you can now message them with exciting stuff happening on your site and all of the other exciting stuff that comes with BuddyPress (although features will probably differ slightly between WP and WPMU).

But I want to try it out now! You do?! That’s lucky, as I’ve just written a series of posts about BuddyPress on my blog, Nometech.com! The series, in three parts takes you through the installation of WordPress MU in part one, then the installation of BuddyPress in part two and finally customizing and ‘getting to grips’ with BuddyPress in part three.

I’ve got something to say about this. Leave a comment below then. And you heard it here first. The BuddyPress revolution is coming!

This post was submitted by Alex Denning, a Twitter fan and WordPress blogger on Nometech.com.

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I launched my blog, Nometech.com just over a month ago where I have really placed a strong focus on my screencasts.  My latest screencast focuses specifically on learning how to design for WordPress.

WordPress design can get fairly complicated, but it doesn’t have to be: in the first episode of the series, the basics are covered: taking an HTML theme and converting it to WordPress. No posts or pages yet, just getting to grips with how WordPress file system works and then expanding on from there.

So…want to learn how to design for WordPress? Head over to Nometech.com and watch the video.

This post was submitted by Alex Denning, a Twitter fan and WordPress blogger on Nometech.com.

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