Archive for category 'General'

Jan 30 2012

Update about the Arctica theme for WordPress

After being in the review queue for the official WordPress theme directory for more than three months, the Arctica theme was finally reviewed a day ago. Since it was based on the same code base as my two latest themes, Asokay and Lagom (which are both approved and published on wordpress.org), I expected the review of Arctica to result in an approval as well.

I was wrong. Arctica was turned down, with the only argument being that it "appears to be a copy of Toolbox with only minor style changes". With the approved Asokay and Lagom in mind, and knowing the amount of changes that I had to make to get those two approved, I disagree with that conclusion and have asked the reviewer to clarify why Arctica is treated differently than my previous two themes. Until I get a chance to understand the reason for the non-approval, Arctica will still be available from this site, just like before. It works well, but you will not get update notifications inside the WP-admin until the theme is approved and added to the wordpress.org theme directory.

By Andreas Viklund • General • 1 Tags: , ,

Jan 17 2012

Notepad++ 2.5.8 released

The code editor of my choice, Notepad++, has been updated to version 5.9.8. It is a minor update, but it includes a welcome addition of drag-and-drop capability in the project manager.

By Andreas Viklund • General • 0 Tags: ,

Jan 11 2012

How do WordPress plugins affect site performance?

One of the best things about building websites with WordPress is the flexibility you get from the wide range of WordPress plugins available. But every plugin that is added affects the performance of the website. If the number of installed plugins is high, the difference can be quite significant. Dev4Press has published a detailed test showing how 35 different plugins affect the performance of a WordPress website, and it is a really interesting post that provides a good point on optimization by simplification. In some cases, it may actually not be worth installing some plugins as the negative effect on performance is bigger tan te positive effect of the added feature. Check it out, and if you know about more tests similar to this, I'd be happy to know about them.

By Andreas Viklund • General • 2 Tags: , ,

Jan 3 2012

WordPress 3.3.1 released

Just a short note: A new version of WordPress has been released. WordPress 3.3.1 is called a "security and maintenance release", and it fixes a number of issues found in the recent v3.3 release. As always, updating to the latest release is highly recommended.

By Andreas Viklund • General • 4 Tags: ,

Jan 1 2012

2012 has arrived…

Today is a Sunday, the first day of the new year. I have spent the day tweaking details on the new site design which just went live. If you are a returning visitor, you can notice that andreasviklund.com has got a new look. You will still be able to recognize the layout and find your way around the site, most things can be found where they were before. But many other things have changed, and I will write more about it in future posts.

This new design was built from a theme by Themify, which I used as a starting point to get access to a number of useful backend features that I don't have enough programming skills to build myself. The basic layout was similar to the previous design of andreasviklund.com, so it was kept – although with a number of modifications. Custom styles for presenting the template gallery and theme pages were added, and a lot of code that was not needed was removed.

I would guess that I will end up changing more things along the way, there are still a number of things to optimize and improve. I will also need to find alternatives for a couple of plugins which I have used in the past, which stopped working with the upgrade to WordPress v3.3.

What is different?

The biggest change in terms of the site structure and content is that the frontpage of this site now shows the blog with the five latest posts, instead of three excerpts and links to the latest posts in the different categories. You can find the "Learn", "Build" and "Share" categories in the navigation menu above, by hovering the "Intro" button. Template screenshots are no longer shown on attachment pages, but in a Lightbox-style slideshow. Social media buttons will be moved to the header, translation links are ready to be included in each post instead of in the sidebar. The layout, which is currently fixed, will be made responsive as soon as I can test the fluid CSS on more mobile devices. Several of these changes require plugin updates, which I will do as soon as this post is published. If you find any errors or have any suggestions for improvements, please let me know. General feedback is of course also welcome.

With this, I wish you all the best for year 2012!

By Andreas Viklund • General • 2 Tags:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 »
')