Categories
General

New design for this blog

I have been very busy in the last few weeks, many things to do. I needed to recharge my energy. And this is the result: a new design for my blog. I created this theme for fun, at least to keep my mood in balance, to bring my mood back to the other design work.
After upgrading to WordPress 2.7 few days ago, I wanted to have some changes here, especially by taking advantages from new features introduced in the latest WordPress, e.g. built-in threaded comment. Here are some notes on my new blog design.

Template tags

Still related to template tags, I try to take advantage from the way WordPress produces CSS selectors. Here is an example. Open index.php in default theme folder, you should see this for the entry loop:

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

The code above will produce something like this:
<div class="post hentry category-services category-sites category-www category-webdev tag-htaccess tag-facebook tag-linkedin tag-service tag-twitter tag-url" id="post-1026">
Do you see the pattern? It will produce some post classes on the entry data (categories and tags). This function is called post_class(). By this, we can customize how each entry (inside the loop) should be displayed, just work with the stylesheet.
If you want to make you theme compatible well with WordPress 2.7, just head to Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 article at WordPress Codex. There are some other useful information for theme designers — and also for you as bloggers.

Categories
General

SimplePie Updates

Simplepie Logo
Last week, Geoffrey Sneddon of SimplePie planned to leave his role developing SimplePie. As a reminder, SimplePie is a code library (written in PHP) that can be use to do creative things using RSS and Atom feeds. If you have heard about Magpie RSS, SimplePie does similar actions. Do I use it? Well, when I developed Asia Blogging Network together with the team, I also use SimplePie to display global entry from the network. You can see the action on the frontpage.
Okey, so does SimplePie join the deadpool? It seems not. Ryan Parman — the other developer — took over the development. And another new version of SimplePie (SimplePie 1.1) was released few days ago, with some improvements. Great!