Jose M Castaneda

Category: WordPress

  • Temporary look change

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    Yes. Until the end of the year this site will be rocking the 2016 default theme that is under construction. Yes, you read it right. It looks vastly different from the last theme. I may switch it out after the new year but until then, this will be the look. Next steps Down the line…

  • What makes a good WordPress theme

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    I’ve been reviewing themes for quite some time and over the course I’ve learned a lot about the good parts, the bad parts, and the in betweens. All these themes have a few things in common. What I like to call guiding principles. I think of them much like I do the principles of design;…

  • My review process

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    Earlier today I made a screencast of how I review themes. This is not my entire method. There is a lot more involved. The things I didn’t do are make the comments in the ticket, assign the ticket, go over any sanitation/validation or comment on some core functions that can be used and may be…

  • Starting today

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    Today I decided that I would start using WordPress nightly builds on this site. The seed that was planted was from Ryan Boren’s post on the core blogs. If you haven’t read it or come across, I highly recommend you read it if you work with WordPress. Even more so if you develop themes and…

  • Using active callbacks in the Customizer

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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…

  • Two or three column section

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    A while back I wrote a quick and dirty tutorial on how to display more than one page. This can be done in a number of different ways. You can read about them in other tutorials and guides because this time I’ll go over another method using the WP_Query method. The codex page some really…

  • Widgets and when to use them

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    Widgets are a great way of showing information in specified areas. Themes handle this in different locations and different ways. Some have page template with up to thirty widget areas. Yes, thirty! Sorry, felt like a salesman when I typed it out but it is true. And then you get the occasional theme that wants…

  • Customizer: dropdown category selection

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

  • Fun with template tags: header, footer, sidebar, and template_part

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    Yes, does look like a lot but they all share a few things in common. Not just the fact they have a do_action before the file is loaded but they also use locate_template in order to load the file. The functions look fairly similar: The slight difference is get_template_part. Now, what’s pretty neat is that…

  • My lack of creativity

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    This is a sore subject in the dot org world currently and it makes me laugh as I read all the comments. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it was a decision to use the customizer as the basis of all theme options that are hosted in WordPress.org‘s free repo. The reason I…