It’s easy to find tutorials about the basics of WordPress theme design: the loop, comment forms, template files, etc. If you’re looking to add more advanced functionality to your theme, however, you won’t find help so easily. Sometimes I think commercial theme designers intentionally keep their secrets to themselves…
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10 Advanced WordPress Theme Development Tutorials
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Horizontal Accordion Slider with Vertical Text
In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at how to build a horizontal accordion slider using CSS 2D transforms and a bit of jQuery.
Typically, the trickiest part about this kind of horizontal accordion is getting the text on the accordion “spines” to display vertically, so people usually use images to display the text. It’s not simple, but using some CSS 2D transforms, we can actually make the text display vertically without using images.
2D transforms work in most modern browsers, but for those that don’t, we’re going to have our accordion degrade gracefully, without resorting to images.
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Posted in Tutorials
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Custom WordPress Widget Template
I had a bunch of custom widgets to create for this theme, mostly for displaying ads, and then one to display twitter/RSS followers, and one to display a tabbed widget that included popular posts, recent posts, tags and comments. Creating a custom widget is surprisingly easy, after getting the first one done, I just modified it for the others. I thought I’d share a basic template for a custom widget, which can be modified to do all sorts of things. The possibilities are endless!
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Posted in Code Snippets
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WordPress 3.2 & New Default Theme
I love WordPress updates, they’re my favourite part of WordPress by far. Each major update brings all sorts of fun new goodies and brings the system just a little closer to perfection. I always feel a bit smug every time an awesome new update rolls out, because I know I picked the right platform to learn and recommend. WordPress 3.2 came out just a short while ago, and I’m pretty damn pleased.
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WordPress Featured Content Slider
So I’ve had this WordPress theme PSD sitting around for ages, and I haven’t bothered coding it up for a long time… because I already did it. Word to the wise: if you find yourself needing to re-install MAMP, backup your htdocs folder. Anyways, so upon re-visiting this theme, I remembered that it took me ages to come up with a satisfactory content slider, and for the life of me couldn’t remember what my solution was. It involved popular plugin x… I think…
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Posted in Tutorials
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Just Another WordPress Web… Site?
When I first started working with WordPress, I had to fight with people to convince them it was powerful enough to be used as a CMS. Clients lumped it in with Blogger and Posterous as something for amateur bloggers and teenagers with too much time on their hands. Though WordPress may have humble beginnings, I’ve really enjoyed seeing it develop into a much more powerful technology in the past couple of years. Continue reading
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