WordPress Designers and Developers in Minneapolis, MN

WordPress TwentyTen Accordion Child Theme

April 15th, 2011 — Blog Post, theme, Wordpress

I was playing around with jQuery UI and WordPress over the weekend and built this simple, accordion child theme of TwentyTen.  Of course, I also maintain “The Mighty Moo!“, a custom accordion WordPress theme.

The theme, called “The Mighty Accordion“, and it is awesomely simple and elegant.  It does not add any styles and instead relies completely on the TwentyTen default styles.  It really only does a couple of things:

  • Provides and loads the jQuery UI plugin
  • Adds a couple of divs to index.php and loop.php (so that jQuery UI can target the proper divs)
  • Adds a simple script to activate the accordion

Download

Download “The Mighty Accordion” for free!

Installation

Just download the file (above) and then go to “Appearance” in the WordPress admin and upload & install The Mighty Accordion TwentyTen theme

Disclaimer

This theme has not been extensively tested and should not be used on any live website.  There are likely some issues with this theme, and it is being provided “as-is”.  Please let me know if you would like me to do some custom WordPress development on this theme.

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WordPress Calorie Intake Counter Theme

December 28th, 2010 — Blog Post, theme, Wordpress

Let’s just say my pants have been struggling to keep up with my width. I need to start looking at my diet.

So, I thought this would be a great time to utilize custom post types from within a WordPress theme.  The goal would be to create a theme that tracks:

  • Foods that I eat + calories contained in each food item (i.e. apple = 110 calories)
  • Categories of food that I eat (i.e. sweets, breads, grains, dairy, etc.)
  • Daily caloric intake (i.e. “1095 calories eaten today”)
  • Qualitative feedback about whether or not I met my caloric goals (i.e. I burned 27 more calories than I took in today!  That is good.)

I could create a custom post type called “Daily Calorie Tracker”.  Each day, I would create a “Daily Calorie Tracker” post that would have:

  • custom fields for “type of food” (i.e. apple) with a value of the calories in that type of food (i.e. “110″)
  • custom fields for the category that each food item is in (i.e. fruit)
  • daily caloric intake goal (i.e. 2000 calories)

Using PHP, I would then display the results of my day’s caloric intake on the front end of the website as well as suggestions for improvement.

Using Heavy Analytics, I would then track how I am doing against my goals.  Am I doing good?  Do I need improvement? etc.

That’s my idea for the night.  What do you think?  Any suggestions on how I can streamline this?  Did I miss anything?

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Alternative to 37 Signals’ Highrise: A WordPress Theme

October 11th, 2010 — Blog Post, plugin, theme, Thoughts, Wordpress

In case you missed my last post, I believe we can build a simple WordPress theme that rivals 37 Signals’ Highrise application in terms of functionality and ease of use.

I got so excited about the prospects of building that theme that I stayed up all night working on it.  It is currently working well, with the ability to add “Contacts” and “Deals” (similar to how you do it in Highrise) using custom post types as well as task management via Google Calendar (my calendar of choice).

The theme is currently a child theme of Hybrid.  Down the road, I might convert it to a plugin, but for now I am focusing on the theme.

Following are some specific steps I have taken to date:

  • Started with a Hybrid Skeleton-based child theme of Hybrid
  • Added custom post type for “Contacts” and “Deals” (I did this rather than regular, old posts just to gain some experience using custom post types.)
  • Installed “Custom Field Template” plugin (The need for this plugin will likely be replaced with a custom plugin that I build into functions.php.)
  • Installed “Simple Custom Post Type Archives” plugin to create “index” directories for custom post types.  This plugin didn’t work as expected, so I deleted it.
  • Created “All Deals” and “All Contacts” page templates to display the custom post types (WordPress does not have this functionality out of the box as of version 3.0.1)
  • Added “Tasks” page and embedded Google Calendar iFrame into it

To-Do

  • Style the site
  • Fix business card view (it’s quite buggy right now)
  • Figure out how to sort by custom field info that is attached to custom post types

Roadmap

  • Notifications
  • Figure out how to utilize WordPress categories within custom post types.  (Do I really need to use custom taxonomies???)

I am still undecided as to whether or not all this is necessary for a small operation like mine.  Frankly, a Google calendar would do the same job as Highrise.  Really, we are just talking about different systems that do the same thing.  Both Google calendar and Highrise do different things better.  Google Calendar by its very nature is better for scheduling and keeping track of follow-up meetings, while Highrise is better at sorting contacts.

The bottom line is that CRMs require time and effort.  Nothing worthwhile is free.

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MIMA Summit WordPress Geekout

September 28th, 2010 — BuddyPress, theme, Wordpress, Wordpress plugin

Peter Fleck and I are going to be rocking the WordPress Geekout at MIMA Summit in just a few minutes.  The format will be wide-open discussion and sharing of WordPress fanciness.

While we hope that the crowd generates most of the content of the session, we have some ideas on the backburner just in case discussion needs a kickstart.  Here are some fresh WordPress ideas for you to take a look at:

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How to Create a BuddyPress 1.2 Child Theme

January 25th, 2010 — BuddyPress, theme

I just spent a good 30 minutes figuring this out, so I thought I would post just in case anyone out there is having a similar mental block.  :)

To create a BuddyPress 1.2 child theme, simply create a new folder in your normal “wp-content/themes” folder and then put a style.css file into that folder with the following code at the top:

/*
Theme Name: YOUR THEME NAME HERE
Theme URI: http://buddypress.org/extend/themes/
Description: YOUR THEME NAME HERE based on default 1.2 theme for BuddyPress.
Version: 1.2
Author: BuddyPress.org
Author URI: http://buddypress.org
Template: bp-default
*/

/* Layout styles for home page, internal pages and blog/directory pages */
@import url( ../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/default.css );

/* Default theme admin bar styles */
@import url( ../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/adminbar.css );

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