Interview: Elmastudio

By Devin

Elmastudio is a WordPress theme shop run by Ellen Bauer and Manuel Esposito. Their approach to themes in unique, with interesting layouts and minimalist artful design. Even content for the theme demos has original photography and writing.

We talked a few months ago via Skype, soon after the release of Onigiri and Ponsonby. We discussed the design process, finding inspiration, traveling, and the WordPress community. I was inspired by the creativity and passion they bring to their craft. We talked for a little over an hour, which I edited that down to about 45 minutes of audio. I also wrote up much of the interview for you to read below. Hope you enjoy both!

Continue reading →

Themes

I’ve built a number of WordPress themes in the last 6 years. Two are available free on wordpress.org, Portfolio Press and Visual. There’s also commercial versions of each of those with additional features options available for purchase through this site.

If you’re interested in finding more of my work, check out DevPress. It has several of my most recent projects.

Portfolio+

Portflio+

Visual+

visual-theme

Gather

gather

Interview: Mike McAlister

By Devin

I enjoy talking shop with other theme developers. A few months ago I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Mike McAlister.

For those that don’t know Mike, he runs a little theme shop called Array.is and is an excellent designer and developer.

Designer, developer and decision maker. Enjoys details, whitespace, coffee, notebooks, vinyl records and pizza.
Designer, developer and decision maker. Enjoys details, whitespace, coffee, notebooks, vinyl records and pizza.

When Mike and I did the interview, he had just launched a rebranding of Array. We discussed the importance of good design, the economics of the theme business, and how he first got into building themes. Continue reading →

Custom Post Type Boilerplate

By Devin

I was doing a WordPress project this week that required four custom post types along with associated taxonomies and metaboxes. It’s been a while since I’ve done client work, and realized I didn’t have good boilerplate code to build these custom post type plugins from.

In the past, I’ve altered the “Portfolio Post Type” plugin which I’ve written but this has become more specialized for portfolios as Gary Jones and I have worked on it and isn’t as great a starting place as it used to be.

Team post type with metaboxes.
Team post type with metaboxes.

I think it’s really important to have quality code lying around for items like this. Building a custom post type (and especially metaboxes) from scratch each time can be a huge time waste. So, I’m throwing the final product up on GitHub in case others want to fork it and use it as their boilerplate as well. Continue reading →

A New Base Theme

By Devin

The first WordPress theme I ever built was a modified version of Kubrick. I think that’s how most front end developers get started with WordPress- tweaking a core theme or a commercial theme to make it fit. Building one entirely from scratch has never made a lot of sense to me and over the years I’ve used a number of different theme platforms to build on.

History

toolbox-screenshot

I had a love affair with Thematic for a couple years. It was one of the early “frameworks” and a precursor to newer projects like Genesis. It was great if the design fit into the general structure of the theme, but I often found myself writing ten lines of code in order to unhook and rehook different sections of the theme for really minor changes. It was difficult to trace functions across multiple files. Although it made me a much better developer and was excellent for some projects, overall it seemed unnecessarily complex.

Next for me was “Toolbox“. This was a base theme developed by Ian Stewart, the same developer who had started Thematic. It was the complete opposite of a framework: a real simple theme, well structured, and easy to modify. It also followed the HTML5 spec (remember when that was new?!). I built my first publicly released theme (Portfolio Press) off of it as well as several projects for clients.

After Ian took a job with Automattic, Toolbox was forked and became Underscores. More on that over here. It’s an excellent base and many of the themes on WordPress.com are built off of it. There’s a great team of developers maintaining and contributing to Underscores. The code is clean, well commented, and the model of excellent WordPress practices.

Time to Fork

Fork

However, over the last few months I’ve found myself having to do more and more work to get Underscores to where I need it before embarking on a new project. I’ve decided it’s time to fork.

This is not a bad thing of course. Underscores is intended to be base in which to build off of, even if you’re forking it to build your own new base. And a solid base theme is important for any WordPress theme developer- it allows you to move quicker because you don’t need to solve the same problems for every project.

The main reason I’ve decided to fork Underscores is because of build tools. (Though re-using patterns for menus and comments will also be helpful.)

Continue reading →

Features for Theme Developers (WordPress 3.9)

By Devin

WordPress 3.9 will be released this month with some great new features. I think the enhancements for media (drop-in image uploading, audio/video playlists, and better editing options) will get a lot of attention in this release- but there’s also a ton of hidden gems.

I went through 582 tickets and picked some of my favorite enhancements, focusing on the ones I think will be most interesting for theme developers.

Media Features

WordPress now has support for audio and video playlists (and audio/video thumbnail images) thanks to work spearheaded by Scott Taylor:

playlists

Audio, video, and gallery previews are available in the editor and themes can add styling to better display them. Continue reading →

Update Page Templates Automatically

By Devin

In the latest version of Portfolio Press I decided to move all the custom page templates into their own “templates” directory. This helps to organize the files better and simplifies the directory. However, I also needed to build an update routine for existing users who had the page templates set at the previous paths

To do that, I needed to query for all pages that had a page template set, check if matched one of my existing templates, and then update it to the new path. Here’s the code snippet in case it is useful to anyone else. Continue reading →

Post Format Views with Categories and Tags

By Devin

I think it makes a lot of sense to display certain post format archives differently than standard post archives. For instance, image post formats might look a lot better in a grid view with large images rather than a traditional blog format.

It’s easy enough to alter the post format archive template, but the taxonomy views (categories and tags) will still display in the standard layout- even if all the posts are the same format.

I thought it would be great to detect what type of posts were being displayed in the taxonomy before they rendered, and use a different layout if they were all in the same post format. This way I could continuity between the post format archives and taxonomy archives- assuming they all contained the same post format. Continue reading →