Let’s just say a large site, a few weeks and the inner workings of Expression Engine have taken over my life. All is not lost I have continued to work on Charlene, getting in all of the planned updates as quickly as possible. I want to say thanks to the few people that have emailed me looking for the theme, I appreciate it, it’s coming soon and it’s still free!

Moving on…

After careful consideration and a boat load of request I have decided to add thumbnail support to the coming release of Charlene. It will be a theme option, disabled by default and as of right now you will need to edit the size and run the regenerate plugin should you decide that the default 150×150 I have set is not to your liking. I hope that this helps out a lot of you who have asked for thumbnail support, it may get better in the future.

Coming soon I promise! (If you have any questions you can email me at themesupport[at]papertreedesign)

That said I suppose I need to let everyone know when they can expect an update to Charlene. Upon digging in to what I had planned to be a minor upgrade to take advantage of a few 2.9 and 3.0 features as well as a few requests, I came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t happy with where it was at. Since I first released the theme, not only has WordPress improved drastically but so has my skill with WordPress. The theme needs to catch up and thus what was once a minor upgrade will become a major upgrade.

The new plan is to launch the update as soon as possible and no later than next week! Trust me it will include welcome improvements and updates.

Immediately following the update I will be launching Full Foto. After long and careful thought I have decided that Full Foto will be released as a child theme bundled with Charlene with a price tag of $12, a very modest price but one that will help allow me to continue development on both Charlene and Full Foto. The details to come later, both will remain licensed under the GPL.

That out of the way, Papertree Design will also be launching a very very small venture into the commercial theme world with just a few other themes I have on the drawing board. More details to arrive on that as well.

That’s all for the update, if you have any questions please feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email.

Of course it wouldn’t be fair not to mention that I owe a large part of this sudden exposure to Best WordPress Themes. Thanks to Best WordPress Themes for picking up Charlene and putting it in front of so many people.

I also want to thank everyone that has left a comment or suggestion on the theme, as well as those of you who have come to me via email for support. Every question leads to an improvement for future updates.

Speaking of which I have obviously been keeping an eye on the coming WP 3.0, trying to figure out how all of that will effect Charlene, and yes I have started working on updates.

In addition to these updates, I have also started in on making the theme available for easy translation. This will be my first time around trying to tackle localization, so if anyone has a few pointers they would like to lend please leave a comment. I am slowly struggling through it.

Finally I received yet another comment regarding the Charlene Child Theme Full Foto. That’s about the 4th or 5th request so I have promised to start working on something similar for release by the end of May.

Thanks again, as always your comments are welcome.

Oh yeah, the improvement, well here is a screenshot. The new “Privacy On” notification I noticed today when I upgraded to the latest nightly. This let’s me know that the state of my privacy settings and will be especially helpful for those of us that develop WordPress sites. Last thing you need to do is forget to set the proper privacy settings and get yourself knocked out of Google.

Like I said maybe it’s just me.

On that note I am really interested to see if the issue mentioned in this recent post concerning the wpautop function will be addressed in the coming release. I noticed that it is something that has been mentioned previously in Trac and I think it would go a long way in adding support for HTML5 moving forward.

So many things to look forward to in WordPress 3.0, so many new ideas to explore.

I tried to focus on two areas for this update, improvements in base typography (at least in my opinion) and additions/changes that will make the creation of child themes based on Charlene a bit easier moving forward. (see Full Foto – A WordPress Child Theme Built on Charlene)

Please see Theme Update 0.2, posted on Papertree Themes for full details regarding the update. Please direct all comments to that post or feel free to drop me an email with any questions.

Full Foto will be released as a child theme in the near future, other additional child themes are planned. Just for fun.

With each client I find myself offering a variety of ways in which they can learn what they need to learn. In some cases I point them to the codex, in other cases I point them to one of the many various tutorials available across the web. In the end however I still found myself spending a lot of time via email and via the phone, explaining to them the basics.

I believe that a clients understanding of the basics of how their site operates is an important factor in their ability to keep their site “working for them”. So I encourage my clients to learn the basics and use the codex as reference whenever possible and as they have time. However I started to realize that often times my links to information within the codex or other tutorials would get overlooked and they would come back to me with a question.

Bottom line is that they were looking for a quick answer and for whatever the reason may be, diving into something called the codex was a little to daunting.

After time I started to package and ship out a very basic user reference pdf to each one of my clients on completion of the project. Nothing technical because in most cases they would come back to me for that anyway.

This approach saved me phone and email time in going over the basics of their site, plus they would always have it as a reference.

So my plan is to work on updating my current version and since I am doing so I figured that I may as well make available for download.

I realize there are other guides available out there but hey someone might find the one I put together useful so why not.

In my next post I will layout my current sub-sections as well as thoughts on additional subsections. From there I may go on to publish the actual subsections as I add them to the pdf, again feel free to add your comments there.

Note: I plan to link to the codex wherever applicable because I still think that it is the most important reference for the basics.

If you have any ideas for additional information please feel free to share but remember this is very basic use no code, no “speacial tricks”.

<?php
/* theme functions */

add_action('mytheme_secondary_above', 'sidebar_stuff');

function sidebar_stuff() {
	if (is_single()) {
		global $post;
		$category = get_the_category();
		$cat = $category[0]->cat_ID;

		$my_posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&exclude=' . $post->ID . '&category=' . $cat'); ?>

		<ul>

			<?php foreach($my_posts as $post) :
				setup_postdata($post); ?>

			<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>

			<?php endforeach; ?>

		</ul>
	<?php
	}
}

?>

A few weeks back a talented photographer from Belarus dropped a pretty simple and straight forward comment on a recent post from the Charlene Theme demo.

“I want to use it for my photo-blog, but i need to make some changes. I want to make it one column and I want images on the main page.”

Just so happened that I was right in the middle of working on a photo theme, while quite a bit different and not attached to the Charlene theme at all, it did share similar qualities. I figured what better way to develop a theme for possible release than to discuss, one on one, with an intended end user.

After a few back and forth emails discussing the details and why the theme was to be designed the way it was, I decided to take a crack at the request. If he could be patient given my client workload and be open to the possibility that I release the theme after completion then I would certainly look at this a time well spent.

He ends up with the exact theme requested and I get to take a crack at building a child theme from Charlene. This proved to be super easy, the only modifications I made to Charlene were simple modifications that I had already planned to make for an updated release. The majority of the code making it possible to build child themes from it was built in from the start.

It took a couple of weeks and a few breaks in creation but in the end we came out with this. (Small screen grab, see link below for full effect.)

It’s simple and focuses entirely on the content, no frills, no special effects. This is a fine example of when the content makes the page beautiful because I will not hide the fact that the theme did not come close to looking this good when filled with lorem ipsum and a few quick shots of the country side.

Everything down to the language (which I can not read or understand a word of) looks beautiful in the way he envisioned. It was certainly an enjoyable opportunity!

See for yourself http://kovenkin.com/blog/.

Single Post Custom CSS

To start you I got into my functions.php and created a function to grab the custom css for the post. There are of course other ways of doing this but I prefer to set up a function and later call it in my header.php. So:

function my_custom_css() {
global $post;

$css_key = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'css', true);

	if (!empty($css_key) && is_single()) {
		echo '<link rel="stylesheet" href="' . get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/css/post/' . get_post_meta($post->ID, 'css', true) . '" type="text/css" media="screen" />';
	}
}

The first thing we are doing here is setting up the variable $css_key. On the next line we are looking to see if the custom field key is present on the post page, basically what this is saying is if the custom field ‘css’ is available then do this. Notice the is_single() is present here as well since we are looking to target single post pages only. What it does is then echo the appropriate stylesheet.

You will notice that I set up the full path to my stylesheet. Since I will be putting all of my custom stylesheets in one place ../css/post/ it makes no sense to have to type out the full path every time I add a stylesheet to a post. So now when I go to add my custom field all I have to do is enter the key ‘css’ followed by the value of ‘example-post-1.css’.

Now when we finally call this to the header it will look something like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://mysite.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/css/post/example-post-1.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

Adding it to the header.php file. Now we want to actually add this to the header so that it works, so open up your header.php and look for a line something like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://mysite.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

After that you want to add you new function:

<?php my_custom_css(); ?>

This is a basic concept that can be used in a variety of creative ways, I would tell you what I am doing with it right now but unfortunately that is top secret.

I should note here that there are other ways of calling this to your header.php such as using hooks like wp_head. (I have a preference to using a hook considering most of my work is done via Child Theme).

While I had intended to first finish other themes I have been working to release I was stopped short by a recent theme support request and decided instead to focus on improving Charlene. After all 90 some people have downloaded the theme at the time of this writing so I at least owe it to them to make some improvement.

Additionally during this time I will start writing up a series of articles sharing some of the things I have learned and experimented with since the last time I really got serious with writing about WordPress.

If you have experimented with the Charlene theme be sure to subscribe to updates here for news on the coming upgrade.