Archive for tag 'wordpress'

Feb 12 2011

Publish your WP-theme on andreasviklund.com

As the interest for my WordPress themes continues to be big despite a lack of updates for a long time, I have decided to put more energy on the WordPress themes page and start creating new themes again. I have not kept up with recent changes that WordPress 3.1 will require from new themes, but I have spent the last couple of days learning more about it. Expect an update to the themes page in a few days.

I would also like to post a reminder that I am open for letting other theme designers promote their themes here on andreasviklund.com, and that I would be happy to distribute well-coded WordPress theme ports of my free website templates. I know that there are a couple of designers out there who are currently working on building themes from my templates, and I am really looking forward to try the themes out once they are completed. But there is room for more themes, even ones that are not based on any of my templates. If you would want to publish your theme here and make it reach the many bloggers and site owners who come here looking for themes every week, please get in touch!

By Andreas • General • 0 Tags: , ,

Feb 7 2011

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0.5

In order to speed up the site, I have installed a couple of plugins and done quite a lot of optimization work on the site. Since some time back, andreasviklund.com is using WP Minify and WP Super Cache, which appeared to give a significant boost to the site performance. However, I have realized that it has had some unwanted effects where recent updates and new blog posts have not been visible on all parts of the site – probably because visitors have seen cached versions of some pages even after they have been updated. I have adjusted the cache settings now to refresh the cache more often, so that problem should now be solved. I have also updated to the latest version of WordPress today, an update which caused some other unexpected results that has now been fixed.

After extensive testing and fixing, it appears as if everything now works as it should. I will re-post two blog entries that got lost in the update, as well as publishing two more free website templates, during the next couple of days. I will also publish part 2 in the image gallery tutorial series, as well as the modified version of the Gallery template with the jQuery image gallery plugin included. Stay tuned for a big update on Wednesday, February 9th!

By Andreas • General • 1 Tags: ,

Jan 6 2011

“Stylesheet is missing” in WordPress?

One question that I get often is why a “Stylesheet is missing” message appears in the WordPress administration page where the themes installed for a site are listed. The idea that the theme is broken in some way or that something is wrong with the CSS file (renaming the file from template-name.css to style.css doesn’t work). Since this error appears as the result of a common misunderstanding, it is worth explaining the reason again:

Website templates are not WordPress themes

This error occurs when one of the free website templates is uploaded to the themes folder of a website that runs WordPress as the content management system. The free templates are HTML and CSS files, and they do not contain any scripting at all. Since the files in the template folder are not split up into .PHP files with the code needed for WordPress to recognize the template as a WordPress theme, the free templates will simply not work with WordPress (or any other content management system) in their original form. Website templates can be modified into themes for WordPress and many other site engines and content management systems, but that will require additional coding.

Read more about building themes from templates

To read more about the difference between a template and a WordPress theme and learn how to create a theme with a HTML/CSS template as the starting point, I recommend this step-by-step tutorial from WebDesignerWall. It is a bit outdated since the current default WordPress theme looks different from the theme in the tutorial, but the basic structure of a WordPress theme is still the same. The official documentation site for WordPress, the Codex, also has a lot of material to study.

This is a topic which I will write more about in the future, possibly in the form of an own tutorial where I use one of my own templates as the starting point. But until then, if you come here looking for WordPress themes, there is a WordPress themes page where you can download theme versions of a few of my templates.

I am currently searching for theme designers who would want to convert the rest of my website templates into WordPress themes for distribution through the official WordPress theme directory. If you are an experienced theme designer looking for projects, and you are familiar with the requirements of WordPress.org, please get in touch!

By Andreas • Learn • 1 Tags: , ,

Oct 8 2010

Try the updated WP-Andreas01 theme

I am currently making the last touches on the updated WP-Andreas01 theme for WordPress in order to submit the theme to the WordPress.org theme directory. Changes include widening the theme for 1024px screens, adding correct image alignment classes and support for newer WordPress features such as custom menu and attachments, removal of the right-side subpages box and numerous minor changes and fixes.

There are still a few glitches to sort out for the theme to match the rules for inclusion in the official theme directory, but the theme should still work well for most users as it is now. I’m making the theme available for download here for those of you who want to try it out. I would appreciate bug reports if you encounter any problems, as well as general feedback about the theme. As with the previous version, it is a basic theme without any advanced features, quite faithful to the [andreas01 template->andreas01] which it was originally based on. Blog pages still use a 3-column layout with a widget-enabled sidebar to the right, while content pages use a 2-column layout where widgets can be placed in the left sidebar below the main menu. Give it a try if you want to:

Download the WP-Andreas01 theme for WordPress…

(Note: I am still considering rebuilding the theme as a child theme to the default WordPress theme (twentyten), as it would add a lot of useful features for those who want to use the theme and make future updates easier to manage. That would, however, make the theme more difficult for many users to customize. Still undecided, comments and opinions would be appreciated.)

By Andreas • Build • 9 Tags: , ,

Sep 21 2010

Themes as child themes for better language support?

I am currently working on rebuilding the WordPress themes to make them up-to-date with the current version of WordPress. During this work, I have considered several additions to the themes. One important addition is support for other languages than English. There have been translated versions of my themes, but I have so far never used the internationalization and localization features that are built into WordPress. I started rewriting the WP-Andreas01 theme to support language files, but ran into the same challenge that prevented me from using the feature in previous releases: Any update I make to a text string inside the theme, may result in a need to update all translation files to ensure that the translations work as intended. Before I move on with the theme updates, I would like to ask for some feedback on an alternative solution that could make this challenge into a non-problem:

Would it be a good idea to rebuild the themes as child themes to the default WordPress theme (twentyten), with standardized text strings that makes the child themes work in all languages that twentyten is translated to? Or are there reasons why this would not work?

By Andreas • General • 2 Tags: ,

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