I remember back in the day being excited about Alex King’s Theme Competition and wishing I had some spare time (I was working full time and doing consulting every other moment) to also participate. These early themes were generally simple and were something people would use on their simple blogs -using a hand full of WordPress functions. During this time, the functions.php was unheard of and there were not too many custom functions that were used (for most themes). The big difference between them were mostly in how the sites were laid out with HTML and CSS. Even though these themes were simple – they were great because it allowed you to easily modify the look and feel of your site by editing a few template files and modifying the CSS.

These themes were more about look and less about function.

If you think about themes then and themes now – the difference is often huge. Most themes now are packed with custom functions, have advanced admin options, and give the users greater control of their content, the site’s look and feel, and general options – all without having to modify any template files or know any CSS. Themes are more complex, are generally made up of more template files, and are much more flexible.

These themes are more about providing both users and other developers with a framework and tools to easily manage content.

Recently Alex King/Crowd Favorite released Carrington Build which is a perfect example of where themes are going. This theme offers an unbelievable amount of flexibility and customization and will make both users and developers eager to use this theme.

So as I wrap up development on Lucidity – I am trying to bridge the old (simple) with the new (framework/tools). I look forward to getting this out to the public so they can enjoy the ease of use, flexibility, and further control over their content.

All in all – WordPress themes have come a long way and will not only continue to improve user’s front end experience, but also improve the backend experience when using WordPress. Look for even greater things to come!

Remember – your results will vary based on your hosting environment, your theme, your plugins, etc.

As always – the developers continue to make WordPress easier and more robust with every release. There are some great new features which make WordPress more and more appealing to both small and large companies looking for an easy to use and maintain CMS.

With WordPress 3.0 – there are now “custom post types” which will allow people to better define their content. Example – you are a company that has a portfolio. Instead of using the traditional pages or posts for that, you can create your own “post type” of portfolio which would then keep it completely separate from the blog posts and site pages organizationally. The possibilities are endless.

Creating and maintaing your menus will be easier than ever too. No more custom menu ordering with numbers – you can now drag and drop menu items into place.

There are a number of other changes too which include a new default theme, improved child theme support, some nice new UI touches, improved revision comparison user interface, new template files for better control, and countless other goodies which I am sure I will cover in the coming weeks.

All in all – this is an exciting update which promises to deliver both to users and developers alike!

• First and foremost – working with images just got a lot cooler!
• Thumbnails Finally after creating several custom plugins for this – there is now a simple way to select and then use a thumbnail for each post. Simply add a few lines of code into your theme’s functions.php file and you are ready to go.

  add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
  set_post_thumbnail_size( 150, 150, true ); // Normal post thumbnails

  (more details)

• Cropping Ever need to crop a photo for your post or page? You can now upload any image, use built in crop functions to select the part of the image you want, save the cropped photo, and then use it – all within WordPress. Say goodbye to opening up Photoshop, cropping, saving, uploading, etc. Say hello to an easy to use streamlined process.
• We’ve got trash! No more “crap I just deleted that post”. Now you have the option to Edit, View, or Trash a post or several posts. Once the items are in the trash you can easily recover them or permanently delete them.
• Repair those tables please.Now you can automatically optimization your database by adding this line to your wp-config.php file: define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

Some screenshots of interest

Use As Thumbnail

Crop, Scale, etc

If you have not updated to this version – please take some time and take a look. The cropping alone will save hours of time if you ever needed to manipulate your images! Overall, this update took things one step further to making a solid, feature rich content management system and I am excited to use some of these new features with each new site I create!

• wp_page_menu Easily create a menu with the home page appended onto the menu with a lot of parameters. Similar to the standard wp_list_pages, but with some different possibilities
• the_search_query I have seen several ways to get this, but this is by far the easiest, quickest, and most secure.
• wp_reset_query If you use conditional tags, you will end up going crazy at some point and then will realize this is needed. Note to self everyone.

• My Personal Golf Trainer Coming to Nintendo Wii Finally – real help (in my living room) in the off season!
• Three Potato FourAmazing stuff – I will take one of each
• Twitter Icon SetsLook no further for some amazing icons
• After the Deadline WP plugin to check spelling, style, and grammar.
• Using Lucidity Catalog with Topspin An article I wrote about the Lucidity Catalog theme.

After exhausting all ideas – someone pointed me towards using “Custom Taxonomies” and it was a perfect fit.

What is a taxonomy? Simple – a way to group things. Why not use categories and or tags?

An example to better your understanding:
Right now – on this blog I use tags for my post themes (WordPress Wednesdays, etc). This is not ideal, because I am trying to group together posts by a particular theme, not necessarily by tags. Even though WordPress Wednesday could be seen as a key word – it is more a description or a classification of the post. What I plan to do in the next few days is to go back, create custom taxonomies for all my post themes and then use that for classification of posts instead of using tags. With this, I can then query them using query_posts or even make a tag cloud.

 'wordpress-wednesdays', 'showposts' => 10 ) ); ?>
 'post_theme', 'number' => 15 ) ); ?>

Still confused? Check out the links below. Once you start thinking about organizing information, I think it will make sense.

References:

• Function Reference/register taxonomy
• Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8

If you are only interested in some of my posts but not others, you can easily subscribe to just certain “subjects” very easily.

For example, lately I have been posting on a certain subject each day. (WordPress Wednesdays, etc). If you are only interested in reading those posts, subscribe to this RSS feed: http://www.jappler.com/blog/archive/tag/wordpress-wednesdays/feed. Perhaps you only want to read about things I post in the “Serenity Now” category. You can subscribe to http://www.jappler.com/blog/archive/category/this-and-that/serenity-now/feed. Do you see what I am doing? This logic will work on any tag or category. Find the tag URL (click on a tag) or find the category URL (click on a category in the sidebar) and then add “/feed” to the end of the URL – and there you go. A custom filtered Jappler.com feed.

Just another way WordPress makes it easy to interact with content!