Today’s free WordPress theme is designed by Roshan of CSSHeaven.org (you might know him from his RamblingSoul themes). I ported the static template to WordPress and packed it with WordPress 3.0-specific features, including custom menus, headers, and backgrounds. More on that below.

WordPress 3.0 Menus

As stated above, this theme includes WordPress 3.0 menu support which means you have very flexible control over what links show up in your header menu. If you don’t set up a menu, it will default back to a list of WordPress pages.

For further reading on implementing the WordPress 3.0 menu feature into your own themes, I found these links really helpful:

• Goodbye headaches, hello menus! – A write-up by Justin Tadlock on WordPress 3.0 menus.
• wp_nav_menu – The official WordPress codex on the function used for the menus.

Custom Header

If you want to get rid of the red header image displayed directly below the nav menu, the custom header feature is for you. You’ll need an image 980 pixels wide and 170 pixels high to replace it. If it’s smaller than that, the CSS is coded to position the background image in the center of the div.

For more information on implementing this in your own theme, I found the add_custom_image_header page on the WordPress codex very useful, although I modified it a bit so it doesn’t load styles in the header, just an inline background image declaration on the “header” div.

Of course, feel free to check out the code in header.php and functions.php to see how exactly I did it.

Custom Background

If you want to customize the background image and get rid of the greenish background image currently used, use this feature.

This is by far the easiest feature to implement in a theme, thanks to WP Engineer for the one line code you need to add to your theme’s functions.php file.

add_custom_background();

You also need a wp_head() hook in your header so the internal stylesheet that handles the custom background styles can be embedded.

Custom Thumbnails

As you can see on index/archive/search pages, the posts are laid out in a gallery format. For this, I decided to use the built-in WordPress thumbnail system. It will automatically crunch the images to 270×140.

Thanks to Mark Jaquith’s tutorial for information on integrating this feature into the theme.

Widgets

Like almost all the other themes here, Green Tea is widget ready. The widgetized areas are the sidebar, left footer, right footer, and 404 page.

Conclusion

This should probably go without saying, but you’re going to need to be running WordPress 3.0 for this theme to not spit out a bunch of errors. It’s not backwards compatible, and I did this on purpose to help force people to upgrade to the latest version (which you should be doing anyway).

The reason I chose this particular template because it seemed to have as many elements that I could use to integrate WordPress 3.0 specific features. While I wouldn’t necessarily use these features on my own sites, I can see the value if you’re developing themes for public release or clients.

WordPress 3.0 menu integration is pretty much a must for those, as it makes things so much easier for users in customizing links in menus versus the old way: page lists, category lists, or hard-coded menus. Depending on the design, custom headers would be nice and to some extent, maybe even custom backgrounds (although I’m not a huge fan of this one).

Thanks to Max Luzuriaga for the suggestion of the Green Tea name which I got on Twitter.

Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, I’d love to hear your feedback!

License: Everything is licensed under the GPL, the original template (including CSS and artwork) and the WordPress portion.

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1. WP Clean & Green – Free WordPress Theme
2. RS16 – Free WordPress Theme
3. RS11 – Free WordPress Theme

WordPress includes a lot of stuff through the wp_head() hook included in most themes. Most of this stuff I would consider unnecessary. A few lines of extra code in your header probably won’t slow your site down that much, but I like to keep things as clean and efficient as possible.

In this quick tip post, I’ll go over how to remove the following from being output through the wp_head hook.

• Really Simple Discovery (RSD) link
• Windows Live Writer link
• WordPress generator notice
• Post relational links

Read on for the description of each of these to see if you need them or not, and how to remove them.

Really Simple Discovery

This is the code that displays the following code in your header:

<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://example.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" />

This is the discover mechanism used by XML-RPC clients. If you have no idea what this means and/or don’t integrate services like Flickr with your WordPress site, it’s probably safe to remove it with the following code in your theme’s functions file.

remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');

Windows Live Writer

This is why you see the following code in your header.

<link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://example.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />

If you don’t use Windows Live Writer, then this code is completely useless to you and should be removed.

remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');

WordPress Generator

This is what displays your WordPress version number in your header.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.4" />

Noone really needs to know the exact version of WordPress you’re using, so it’s safe to remove this line of code.

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

Post Relational Links

Post relational links are why this stuff is displayed on various pages.

<link rel='index' title='Main Page' href='http://www.themelab.com' />
<link rel='start' title='Article in the distant past' href='http://www.themelab.com/hello-world/' />
<link rel='prev' title='The Post Before This One' href='http://www.themelab.com/post-before/' />
<link rel='next' title='The Post After This One' href='http://www.themelab.com/post-after/' />

I have yet to find an actual reason to keep these around. Some browsers may use this code to navigate your site, although you can probably get the same effect from a well designed theme. You’ll need three lines to nuke them all.

remove_action('wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'index_rel_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link');

Functions.php Template

For your convenience, here’s all of them combined for easy copying and pasting into your own theme’s functions.php file.

<?php
remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
remove_action('wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'index_rel_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link');
?>

In fact, this is the entire functions.php file I’m using on my new tweet archive theme. If you take a look at the code, the <head> tag only contains three lines: the meta charset declaration, the title tag, and the stylesheet link.

A Note About Released Themes

When you’re developing themes for release, be careful in removing some of these, especially the first two: XML-RPC and Windows Live Writer support.

The reason should be pretty obvious, because some of your users will likely use something like Windows Live Writer, and will come back to you asking for support when they can’t figure out why it doesn’t work with your theme.

The other items, the WordPress generator notice and post relation links, can probably be safely removed in almost any situation.

Conclusion

Like I said in the intro, it’s not a huge deal if you don’t remove these and I wouldn’t call this a “must” on every new WordPress site you develop. If you’re like me and don’t like useless lines of code, you’ll probably want to anyway just to keep things running as cleanly as possible.

Can you think of any other functions that you use to remove lines of unnecessary WordPress code? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Ever Wanted To Remove The /category/ Base?
2. Get a CSS Killswitch Effect With Only One Line of Code
3. Dissecting Astatic – Thematic Child Theme Tutorial

I launched a site called WPCamelCase to help people learn how to spell WordPress. This is something I’ve tried to passively promote on this site by spelling every instance of “WordPress” with a capital P.

The Spelling

WordPress is spelled in a CamelCase form. If you notice on any official WordPress websites, it is always spelled with a capital P, although as far as I know there is no real explanation as to . The most common misspellings are “Wordpress” or “Word Press.”

Being in the community for a while, I personally cringe if I see it misspelled, and I’m sure the creators of WordPress do too, which is why a patch was introduced in WordPress 3.0 to automatically correct the lowercase P misspelling to an uppecase one, much to the opposition of certain members of the WordPress community.

The Problem

Unfortunately with the way it filters your content to convert Wordpress to WordPress, it is possible to break links such as images or other URLs. For example:

• An image with the URL of http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/Wordpress-image.jpg would be renamed to http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/WordPress-image.jpg and a broken image would show up
• Your blog is installed in a directory called http://example.com/Wordpress, any of your internal links would be renamed to http://example.com/WordPress and you’d have a bunch of broken links

To “correct” this behavior, you can install the Remove Wordpress to WordPress filter plugin.

Conclusion

Instead of forcing users to spell it correctly, I think it’s better to educate users on how to spell it, which is exactly why I made WPCamelCase.com along with my GPL-licensed haiku.

Adding this sort of code to the WordPress core doesn’t help the software at all, and probably makes it worse with the broken link issues people are reporting so far over something that is relatively inconsequential.

I usually don’t talk about these sort of semi-controversial, community-oriented issues here on my blog, because frankly, I think the majority of my audience, along with the vast majority of WordPress users, couldn’t care less about these things.

I thought it was worth mentioning due to the fact this addition to WordPress core has the possibility to break things.

Further Reading

• Lowercase p, dangit! by Justin Tadlock
• The dangit filter by Benjamin Bradley
• Automatically Correcting The Wordpress Mistake by Jeff Chandler
• Changeset 14996 – The original trac ticket

Related posts:

1. New Community Links Page
2. How Do You Feel About Sponsored Themes?

Got a couple requests today to port this template by Mohd Huzairy to WordPress, so I did. As you can see, it’s super simple with a very minimalistic design. In the WordPress theme, I added a few features like a widgetized sidebar and threaded comments.

Related posts:

1. Simple Gray – Free WordPress Theme
2. RS11 – Free WordPress Theme
3. Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme

First of all, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes to Theme Lab’s third birthday. The response was way bigger than any of the previous birthday posts, most likely because of the massive giveaway contest.

The Winners

As announced on Twitter yesterday, the winners are @momma_money, @WPminme, @ronaldb.

I have already gotten in touch with all of them and in the process of organizing the prize distribution. Big congrats to them.

The Prizes

As a refresher, here were the prizes again:

• A copy of the Genesis Theme Framework from StudioPress – $59.95 value
• A copy of the Genesis Buddy child theme from PremiumBPThemes.com – $24.95 value
• A personal license of the BackupBuddy plugin from PluginBuddy – $45 value
• A single site support license to Gravity Forms – $39 value*
• A PDF copy of the Digging into WordPress book – $27 value

Thanks to all the generous sponsors, couldn’t have done it without them! Well, actually I could have but it would have cost me $587.70, so it’s probably better that they donated the prizes.

Conclusion

I plan on writing up a review of the service I used to draw the winners, Tweetaways on my personal blog soon. There were a couple of minor glitches but overall it worked as advertised.

And now back to your regularly scheduled content. WordPress 3.0-friendly themes anyone?

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1. Theme Lab Is 3 Years Old Today – Massive Three-For-All Giveaway
2. We Have Four Contest Winners
3. BackupBuddy Contest Winners Announced