WordPress Wednesday: AVH Themed By Browser

When you go about choosing a theme for your WordPress-powered blog, you should probably go through the process of testing compatibility in a variety of browsers. Some themes may render perfectly in Firefox but look like a jumbled mess in Internet Explorer. One theme may look fine in Google Chrome, but it could be completely unreadable when viewed through the Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3. What can you do?

One possible solution is to tweak the code in your existing blog theme so that it is compatible with all of these different browsers. Another possible solution is the unique AVH Themed by Browser WordPress plug-in by A Virtual Home. The idea here is that a different theme is automatically selected when a certain browser is detected.

In this way, someone viewing your blog from a PlayStation 3 can see your blog through a different theme than someone viewing the same blog content through Internet Explorer on a laptop. Some browsers may not be able to handle Javascript or iFrames, but you don’t want to take away those features from people who can view them. By using AVH Themed by Browser, you can really have the best of both worlds.

The most recent version was released on June 21, 2009. For more information and to download the free plug-in, check out AVirtualHome.com. The installation process seems to be relatively straightforward.

WordPress Development: Theme Basics

Last week we defined what each of the “standard” theme files was for. This week we’ll be discussing what you should put in those files. Although you are free to use these files how you like (or not use them, in theory you could use just one file for your whole theme), this way of developing themes has largely become the standard way of doing things. This week we’ll go over some of the more basic concepts, then next week we’ll tackle “the loop”.

Before creating your theme, I would recommend that you already have the design coded and ready to go. Once you have that all ready to go, you can go ahead and make it into a WordPress theme.

Let’s start out by talking about the header.php file. This file should contain the beginning of your document, the head of your document and (usually) the “header” of your page. Basically, anything that you want to be at the beginning of every page of you theme, should go in the header.php file.

The index.php, single.php and page.php all use “the loop”, and we’ll be discussing them next week. However, if you think ahead here, if you have a common div that will be used on all these different page types, then you can add it to your header.php. This will save you from the (minor) inconvenience of putting it at the top of these three files.

The footer.php file should contain your design’s footer and your document ending tags. If you do have that common div we talked about, ending it in this file will also be more convenient.

We’ll continue this on next week, with “the loop”. Following that we’ll be talking about some useful theme functions. Then we’ll finish off this mini-series with widgets and (threaded) comments.

WordPress Wednesday: Lightbox Plus

Your blog design will come with some natural constraints. Your content area is of a certain width, so the images that you embed should not exceed this width. In the past, the way that you’d be able to show larger pictures to your readers is to direct them to another page where they can see the bigger picture. That’s not the case anymore, thanks to the relatively simple advent of the lightbox.

This isn’t completely novel at this point, of course, but it’s great to see how easy it is to implement a lightbox solution on your WordPress blog. Rather than send a reader to another page on your site, they can remain on the same page, click on the thumbnail, and be shown the photograph at a much higher resolution and size. This is similar to the lightbox effect you get when you hit the Upload/Insert Image tool from within the WordPress “Add New Post” dashboard.

One of the easier ways to implement a lightbox on your blog is to use a WordPress plug-in called Lightbox Plus. The plug-in is designed in such a way that when a reader clicks on the thumbnail, the background surrounding the larger image will dim. This adds to visibility and usability. When they are done viewing the image, they can click anywhere in the dimmed portion to return to reading your blog post.

For more information, including a FAQ, screenshots, and a changelog, check out the Lightbox Plus page in the WordPress repository. It is also there that you can download this plug-in.

WordPress Wednesday: WPhone Makes Mobile WP Easy

We are leading an increasingly mobile lifestyle. At the same time, we are also leading an increasingly connected lifestyle. From the iPhone to the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile to every other smartphone on the market, we want to have a strong connection to the Internet no matter where we find ourselves over the course of the day. The trouble is that many websites don’t render very well in the mobile environment.

You may already know about some of the solutions that make your WordPress blog a little more friendly for mobile devices like smartphones. That’s for the convenience and usability of your readers, but what about your mobile experience with your WordPress blog? The admin area, also known as the WordPress dashboard, is incredibly robust and can appear to be very cluttered on the smaller screen of an iPhone or BlackBerry. This is where the WPhone plug-in can come into play.

This plug-in does not create a mobile version of your blog for readers. Instead, it creates a mobile version of your blog’s dashboard for you. Rather than fight through the regular WordPress dashboard, you are presented with a mobile-optimized version that still gives you access to all the key functions. These include the ability to write new posts, manage old ones, go through the comments, and check the latest activity. The page is simplified, so you may have to go through more screens to achieve the same thing, but that sure beats zooming and scrolling to get anywhere.

Check out the the official page for more information and to download WPhone. It is a plug-in that you install on your WordPress blog and not an application that you install on your phone.

Update WordPress 2.8

Attention bloggers if you have manually installed WordPress then you should upgrade to 2.8. This upgrade makes improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies and overall speed. Also over 790 bugs are fixed in 2.8.

For those who installed WordPress with Fantastico, Netenberg usually has the upgrade released a week or two later. We do post Fantastico updates on the blog so keep an eye open for that.

Please also note we will post when it is time for Managed Blog hosting customers to upgrade in this blog.

WordPress Wednesday: Yahoo-Powered Posting

I think that most WordPress bloggers access the administration area on their blogs in order to compose and publish new blog posts, but there are a variety of other tools out there that you may want to consider as well. For example, some writers find that using Live Writer to compose and publish blog posts is easier, more user-friendly, and potentially more powerful. Similarly, there are mobile tools for publishing through an iPhone and other similar handsets.

Although only available to US publishers at this time, Yahoo! has also released a new tool that works from within Yahoo! Mail, letting you edit and publish new blog posts without ever leaving your Yahoo! Mail interface. Should this application turn out to be a relative success for Yahoo!, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we started to see similar solutions implemented in Gmail and Hotmail too.

In short, there is a WordPress application for Yahoo! Mail that is meant to work with both Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org-powered blogs. From within the Yahoo! Mail interface, you enter your credentials, compose blog posts, and publish them without ever entering the WordPress dashboard itself. You can also drag and drop email messages into the composer, instantly creating new blog posts based on these emails. Interestingly, there is only support for tags and not for categories at this time.

For more information and a brief walkthrough, check out this great post on weblogtoolscollection.com.