Jose M Castaneda

Tag: theme

  • Always a work in progress

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    Jose
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    Yesterday I was able to change out the theme to this site. I spent most of the day just fiddling and trying to get things to just work. I took a theme from the free repository and scrapped a lot the unused files. Yeah. There were quite a few that I didn’t really need. Many…

  • Copy paste is hurting your theme

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    Jose
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    I’ve seen quite a few themes that have been doing this thing of passing an argument to the function when they could be using a filter. I get it we all have our methods. But when there is a better practice would you rather use the better practice or a wrong one? I choose the…

  • Some theme review videos

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    Jose
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    It’s been some time since I was last able to record some video on theme reviews. The last time I did it was a quick overview of my review process. Super simplistic overview of a theme review. Today I was able to record an overview of what an admin review can be. As you can see I…

  • Working with paginate_links

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    Jose
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    It is no secret that I try to advocate the use of core functions when possible. The idea of maintaining less code is a great one for any developer. It’s the old set it and forget mentality. What I do see a lot of is the use of my_theme_pagination that uses get_pagenum_link in order to get…

  • Three sliders, one option, and a few tears later

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    Jose
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    I am not a huge fan of sliders until they are used in a decent way. The only way I sort of like them is in an image gallery but even then it has to be somewhat incorporated with a lightbox, colorbox, whatever you would like to call it. These sliders are slowly becoming a…

  • Why theme documentation matters

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    So, you have a theme in the WordPress repository and have some documentation but you only have the basic information. How can you improve upon that?

  • WordPress Static Front Page

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    Jose
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    Setting up a front page is hard. So many things to think. Do you want a page of your latest writings to be what a visitor first encounters or do you want a static page? Perhaps a unique template so as to differentiate between the rest of the site?

  • Using active callbacks in the Customizer

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    Jose
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    One thing I haven’t seen many themes use is active callbacks to their advantage. What are they and how can they used? It’s actually quite simple and there are two methods that the customizer has available. The first one is when you first create the section, panel, or control. Great! We have a section but…

  • Customizer: dropdown category selection

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    Jose
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    Using the get_categories function with the customizer can be tricky. This is a code snippet to help out.

  • Using the_post_thumbnail

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    Jose
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    For some time I’ve noticed one thing that many people like doing. Recreating core functions. One being the_post_thumbnail(). The reason it drives me crazy is because it means maintaining more code in your theme. Why would you do that to yourself? One of the common things is to wrap it in a conditional check and…