Luckily, the core team decided to address the issue, and thanks to the ticket #17979 (quite an active ticket by the way!), widgets now get saved between themes. But why not push that idea further, and change a bit the way widgets are organized today?

Widget sidebars as menus, the Ipstenu way

Mika demonstrated with a series of 3 posts that we could improve the current widget system by completely revisting it, and handle WP sidebars like we manage menus today.

I like the idea because people might view widgets differently. It also makes it easier to manage multiple sidebar areas, so more flexibility in themes in the future.

Besides, I was never a big found of the drag-and-drop thing: it works great, but it is a bit annoying to use when some widgets are expanded, or when you registered a lot of different sidebars. I used to combine sidebars and conditional tags to be able to have different sidebars on different pages, and that quickly becomes quite a mess. Sure, you have a title and a description for each widget area, but the widgets page quickly gets incredibly long.

By viewing each sidebar in a different tab, we would avoid such issues. And by viewing available widgets in a checkbox list, it allows you to quickly browse and find the widgets you are looking for.

register_sidebar elements as options

I would like to add one more option to this Widgets page. This option would not be displayed by default, you could activate it through the screen options, and once you did, you would have access to the different elements associated with that widget area:

• before_title
• after_title
• before_widget
• after_widget

One place to find them, One place to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Today, if you are looking for new widgets, you look for it in the plugin repo: it is handy, there is a tag for it, and you can easily add them directly from your WordPress plugin page. But what if we push the concept a bit further? Mika proposed an area where all your available widgets would be listed. I think it would be great to have one more area, where you could search for available widgets in the plugin repo.

The problem is that many widgets are actually binded to a theme or a plugin, so you couldn’t list all widgets available for download there, but I think that would still be quite useful. Of course, that also means that some clean-up would have to be done in the repo. But Otto is working on that…

And you, what do you think about the widgets management today? Are you happy with it? Do you have any ideas to improve them?

For further reading and experiments

• WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 1
• WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 2
• WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 3
• Ticket #17979: Avoid losing widgets when switching themes

Instant WordPress

I am not sure which feature I prefer so far: there are so many new cool things coming up! The pointers, the new media uploader, the responsive admin interface, better handling of the permalinks… Which one is your favorite?

via WPTavern

To put it simple, by adding different meta tags into the head of your page, you give out information about the specific content you deliver, and all Facebook services, such as the share feature or the Like button, will make good use of this information. In the same way, Facebook uses these tags into profile pages, fan pages and applications.

What are the necessary tags to add to your page ?

Here are all the tags needed:

• Title: speaks fr itself, it is the title of your page or your article. This title will appear as title when people will share your article on Facebook, or like it.
• Description: this part will appear as the default description text when people will share your article on Facebook. In WordPress, the best is here to use different descriptions according to the page you are browsing.
• Type: this defines the category of the information you provide on your site. Types are defined in the Open Graph protocol, and for websites three types exist: Blog, Article, Website. In order to be precise, one solution is to define a different type if you are on the homepage or if you are browsing articles
• URL: also speaks for itself – the URL of the page.
• Image: this image will be added to the content when people share or add a comment using the FBML like button.
• Site_name: speaks for itself, it is the name of your website.

To implement it within your WordPress theme, locate the header.php among your theme files, and edit it with the following variables.

Before to edit the files, you will need the facebook admin id, which can found in the Facebook insights page, when clicking the “insights for your domain” button on the top right. You can also specify your app id, if you are using the like button for example (see paragraph below).
You will also need to know the path to the main logo appearing in the header of your site. If you do not have any, I encourage you to create one, and to add into the images folder of your WordPress theme.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<?php if (have_posts()):while(have_posts()):the_post();endwhile;endif;?>
<!-- Facebook Opengraph -->
	<meta property="fb:app_id" content="your_app_id" />
	<meta property="fb:admins" content="your_admin_id" />
	<meta property="og:url" content="<?php the_permalink() ?>"/>
<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
	<meta property="og:title" content="<?php single_post_title(''); ?>" />
	<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo strip_tags(get_the_excerpt($post->ID)); ?>" />
	<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
	<meta property="og:image" content="<?php echo wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ) ) ?>" />
<?php } else { ?>
	<meta property="og:site_name" content="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" />
	<meta property="og:description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />
	<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
	<meta property="og:image" content="<?php bloginfo('template_url') ?>/path/to-your/logo.jpg" />
<?php } ?>

Then we will add the like button to your site, to show an example of the use of Open Graph data.

How to add the like button to my WordPress blog?

After adding the previous information into your header, we will need to decide of a place for the Facebook like to appear, and call Facebook Javascript SDK in order to connect our website and Facebook.*

Before that, you will need to create a Facebook application: no need to be afraid, it can be done in a few steps:

• Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php
• Give a name to your app, validate,
• Copy the app ID that is given to you
• In the Connect tab, fill in your blog’s homepage URL in the Connect URL field, and save.

Next step will be to integrate the like button to our articles. For this locate and open single.php in your theme files, and add the following where you want the button to appear. If you want it to appear right after your article content for example, locate the_content fonction, and add it after:

<fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" layout="button_count" show_faces="false" width="450" action="like" colorscheme="light"></fb:like>

You can change the layout of that button by changing some of the parameters: have a look at the Facebook like plugin page for more information.

Then, in order to connect the like button to Facebook, we will need to add the reference to Javascript SDK to the footer of our theme*. For that, locate your functions.php file, and add the following line to it:

<?php
// load facebook API
add_action("wp_footer", "werewp_facebook_api");

function werewp_facebook_api()
{
	$fbapi =  "your_app_id"; // Your application ID
	echo
			"<div id=\"fb-root\"></div>
			<script>
			  window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
			    FB.init({appId: $fbapi, status: true, cookie: true,
			             xfbml: true});
			  };
			  (function() {
			    var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
			    e.src = document.location.protocol +
			      '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
			    document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
			  }());
			</script>
			";
}
?>

*As a sidenote, if you are already using some Facebook features on your site, such as a badge for example, you will have to make some changes to that badge and use only FBML code in there, as Facebook Connect is already called now.

And you’re done! The necessary information is now in the header among the other meta data, the Facebook connection is made through the Javascript SDK, and the facebook like button is added with FBML code. That’s it, nothing else is needed!
Let me know if it works, and share it with us in the comments! Thank you, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter! ;)

Update: Following a comment from Mike, here is an extension of that tutorial to include descriptions and custom images for pages.
Lee H also pointed out a solution for those of you who use an old version of WordPress, since the above tutorial makes use of the_post_thumbnail function introduced with WordPress 2.9.

On The Go proposes a CMS layout with a featured section by default, but a blog layout is also available. This design is available in 4 unique color schemes, all declinations of this hand drawn style that appears in all the elements of the theme.

Of course, the theme is full of the features common to all themes from Elegantthemes, now accessible through the new admin theme panel developed last year.

I could say more about that theme, but I guess the best I can do is to advise you to go have a look for yourself!

]]> http://werewp.com/wordpress/on-the-go-hand-drawn-theme-from-elegant-themes/feed/ 0 http://werewp.com/wordpress/wordpress-2-9-is-out/ http://werewp.com/wordpress/wordpress-2-9-is-out/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:28:14 +0000 Jeremy http://www.werewp.com/?p=1082

Do you remember Premiumthemes.net? Created by R. Bhavesh, also the creator for cssace.com, it has been one of the places to look for high quality WordPress themes for some time now.

With frequent releases of themes for all needs (from the wedding site to the kitchen diary), it fits of the needs of everyone and also offers a club membership that will fit the needs of a lot of WordPress developers: for $249 you get access to all the themes and PSDs!

Go have a look! If Templatic is as successful as Premiumthemes.net was, this website is going to have an impact on the theme market!

Lumin WordPress theme

This theme comes in three different colors and seems perfect for a Portoflio site.

Got urgent WordPress questions?

This new project by Darren Hoyt proposes help from pros to solve WordPress emergency issues. You have been looking for the answers, without success? You did not have time to solve this issue and your project has to be handled by tomorrow? WPQuestions seems to be the good place to start.

In such cases, a WordPress search engine would be handy: that it where WPLookup comes in:

The idea is simple: using tools such as PHP Cross reference of WordPress source, from Yoast, and looking into the Codex, this search engine gives you the answers you need in just a search. And to make it even simpler, you can add it to your browser default search tools.

To conclude, this search engine will help you find info about WordPress functions in a few seconds. And if you are looking for other tools to speed up your coding process, do not hesitate to use WPLookup in parallel with these 3 other tools:

• Web Design WordPress function list
• WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet
• 13 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Building WordPress Themes