Xavisys» WordPress Themes http://xavisys.com WordPress Plugins and Custom WordPress Development Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:45:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer? http://xavisys.com/gpl-themes-love-plugins-suffer/ http://xavisys.com/gpl-themes-love-plugins-suffer/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:14:48 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://wpinformer.com/?p=103 Matt Mullenweg asked the Software Freedom Law Center whether WordPress Themes are GPL too. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

As a huge proponent of the GPL, this is exciting. However, as Joost pointed out in On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free, there’s some disappointment as well. The exciting part is that a question that’s long been asked has been answered by a “pro” (albeit a biased “pro”), and the answer is just what many of us wanted to see. Now we can get some people to focus on commercially supported GPL themes rather than just themes with more restrictive licenses. They have even added a Commercially Supported GPL Themes page to wordpress.org! That’s awesome, and a great followup to Matt’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp San Francisco.

So what’s the problem? Well, Matt has said that the plugin developers have been the rock stars in the WordPress community, and it’s time for the theme designers to shine. I have no problem with the theme designers getting to shine, but as a plugin developer I wonder “Where is the Commercially Supported GPL Plugins page? I love to give to the community with GPL WordPress plugins, and will continue to do so, but I’ll also be offering premium support for many of these in the future. I’d like to see the same treatment for theme designers and plugin developers.

Having said all that, I’m really glad to see the GPL themes page and I think it’s a good step in the right direction.

Related Posts:

]]> http://xavisys.com/gpl-themes-love-plugins-suffer/feed/ 4 Improve Performance of Your WordPress Theme in 5 Minutes http://xavisys.com/improve-performance-of-your-wordpress-theme-in-5-minutes/ http://xavisys.com/improve-performance-of-your-wordpress-theme-in-5-minutes/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:00:00 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://wpinformer.com/?p=40 There’s a quick and relatively simple way to increase the performance of your WordPress theme while reducing overall server load. The problem is that most themes are written to be as portable as possible. This comes in handy because you can just drop in a theme and it works with no editing at all. Unfortunately, it means that a lot of information that never changes is queried from the database anyway. If you want to speed your theme up, you can customize it to your site and reduce database queries. All in about 5 minutes.

In order to simplify the post, I’m combining the header.php and footer.php into one file. You should make sure to check both, and maybe even check other files in your theme. Your theme’s header.php and footer.php files probably look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
	<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

	<?php wp_head(); ?>

	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>?20090112" type="text/css" media="screen" />
	<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
	<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
</head>

<body>

<div id="page">

<div id="header">

	<h2><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h2>
	<h3 id="blog-description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></h3>

	<ul>
		<li class="page_item <?php echo ( is_home() )? 'current_page_item':''; ?>">
			<a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a>
		</li>
		<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
	</ul>
	<div id="wpinformer-rss">
		<p><a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">Subscribe via RSS</a></p>
	</div>
	<div class="clear"></div>

</div><!-- end header -->
</div><!-- end page -->

<div id="footer-wrap">

	<div id="footer">
		<p>
			<a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">Entries (RSS)</a> and
			<a href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>">Comments (RSS)</a>
		</p>
		<p>
			<a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a> is powered by <a href="http://wordpress.org">WordPress</a>.
		</p>

		<div class="clear"></div>
	</div>

</div><!-- end footer-wrap -->
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

In the above, you can easily remove language_attributes() on line 2, the bloginfo() calls on lines 6, 10, 11, 12, 21, 22, 26, 31, 42, 43, and 46. In order to find out what to replace them with, simply visit your site and view the (X)HTML source. Find the sections in the code where the functions you want to replace are, and copy the content to your theme. The above files change to this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
	<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

	<?php wp_head(); ?>

	<link rel="stylesheet" href="/wp-content/themes/wpinformer/style.css?20090112" type="text/css" media="screen" />
	<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="/feed/" />
	<link rel="pingback" href="http://wpinformer.com/xmlrpc.php" />
</head>

<body>

<div id="page">

<div id="header">

	<h2><a href="http://wpinformer.com/">WordPress <span>Informer</span></a></h2>
	<h3 id="blog-description">WordPress News and Resources</h3>

	<ul>
		<li class="page_item <?php echo ( is_home() )? 'current_page_item':''; ?>">
			<a href="http://wpinformer.com/">Home</a>
		</li>
		<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
	</ul>
	<div id="wpinformer-rss">
		<p><a href="/feed/">Subscribe via RSS</a></p>
	</div>
	<div class="clear"></div>

</div><!-- end header -->
</div><!-- end page -->

<div id="footer-wrap">

	<div id="footer">
		<p>
			<a href="http://wpinformer.com/feed/">Entries (RSS)</a> and
			<a href="http://wpinformer.com/comments/feed/">Comments (RSS)</a>
		</p>
		<p>
			<a href="http://wpinformer.com">WordPress Informer</a> is powered by <a href="http://wordpress.org">WordPress</a>.
		</p>

		<div class="clear"></div>
	</div>

</div><!-- end footer-wrap -->
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

As you can see, all the functions that return static content have been replaced. What did this gain? I went from 29 queries taking 1.391 seconds to 24 queries taking 0.868 seconds. Taking five minutes to fix my theme has eliminated five queries from every page load of my site, and sped up the home page query time by roughly 35-40%. It’s a quick easy fix with a huge return.

Related Posts:

]]> http://xavisys.com/improve-performance-of-your-wordpress-theme-in-5-minutes/feed/ 7 Free Template: Minimalist http://xavisys.com/free-template-minimalist/ http://xavisys.com/free-template-minimalist/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:49:29 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/free-template-minimalist/ MinimalistMinimalist is an extremely light weight, configurable template, with no images at all! It’s completely fluid, so no matter what the user’s screen width, you don’t waste any space, browser font resizing is completely supported, and it is source-ordered. It includes stylesheets to display main content on the left or right, as well as many alternative colors including grey, green, blue, purple, red, and brown! It validates as XHTML Strict 1.0, and is released as Public Domain. It is available for download over at OpenDesigns.org.

I just converted Minimalist to a WordPress theme, and uploaded it here for anyone that wants it. I was lazy, so it defaults to green/grey with content to the left. If you want to use a different combination, edit the header.php file to use whatever css files you want (all are included). I also included a contact page template, but again was a little lazy, so you will need to edit contact.php and put your contact info on lines 73-75, as well as your E-Mail address on line 17. The only other real changes that were made was styling for comments (as well as unique styling for admin comments), and I added a pencil icon to use for “editing” (it’s still image free for your users).

Related Posts:

]]> http://xavisys.com/free-template-minimalist/feed/ 20