Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

I'm doing a heavy rewrite of my main WordPress theme that all of my other themes are based on. As someone who has spent a lot of time writing code, one of the things that has been bugging me about WordPress themes is all the duplication of HTML.

In a WordPress plugin you can filter many values including the title and content of a post using: add_filter('the_content', 'MyPluginClass::FilterTheContent'); This is pretty handy, but sometimes when you’re writing a WordPress theme you want to allow plugins to add content, not just filter the usual content. Using apply_filters makes this pretty easy because you can call apply [...]

Today, well, really the last few days have been incredibly productive and incredibly hectic. I finished up some complex code for a customer and ever since then I’ve had so many epiphanies that I’ve practically been typing constantly ever since. I will say that I really like when I am inspired like this, but I [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I’m working on a redesign of this theme. That work is very graphics intensive so it goes slower and has to wait for inspiration. But the way I work is that I have one common theme for all my sites and then I retheme each site as appropriate. Each time I focus [...]

For a while now I’ve been dealing with figuring out where to store artwork files for my themes. I had used MobileMe, and DropBox which were OK, but it was still a pain that the Photoshop files were so far away from the rest of the files in the project and they aren’t versioned. MobileMe [...]

I just finished a new theme for Doxie News and I’m really happy with it. I think it’s my best theme yet and I couldn’t want any more from it. As you can see it shares a lot of design concepts with Designoplasty but is distinctly its own. I love the shading in [...]

I just uploaded a new theme. Here’s how I work. I have a base theme that gets updated with the current best technical ideas of my themes. All the good structure ideas go into the base theme that I would generally want all themes to have. Then the other themes need to be updated with [...]

I’m just now getting the hang of the photoshop pen tool. I just finished a WordPress theme where I used it extensively. It’s a very interesting tool because to use it correctly, you don’t just have to understand the different functions, you have to know all the keyboard shortcuts. You also have to understand how [...]

I’m finding that my inspiration comes in waves, and that there isn’t much time in between the waves. My skills are growing at the same time, which intensifies the inspiration. This is good, I suppose, but I’m kind of exhausted. I’ve been working on a theme for days and this theme is more complete and more [...]