E.Share

This is a free tweet archive theme for WordPress, based off of my own tweet archive site. It contains no images and made up of pure CSS (with a few CSS3 properties), and supports custom WordPress 3.0 menu and background support.

How To Set Up A Tweet Archive

First of all, this theme looks really weird if you try to use it for an actual blog. It’s designed to be used to as a tweet archive. If you don’t know how to set one up, please refer to this tutorial: How To Create a Searchable Tweet Archive with WordPress.

Basically all you need to do is backup as many of your current tweets as you possibly can using a service like TweetBackup or BackupMyTweets, export them as an XML file, and import it using WordPress’ built-in importer.

Then to automatically grab new tweets, you’ll need to install the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King and go through the authorization process.

Inspiration

The idea for this theme is definitely inspired by Douglas Bowman’s tweet archive theme and the idea behind it.

Conclusion

Ever since I customized my theme for my tweet archive sub-site, I’ve had a lot of compliments on it. Although I didn’t have any requests to release it, I thought it would be a good idea to develop a “generic” version of the theme without my logo or beaker graphics.

By the way, if you want to see the original tweet archive theme after viewing the live demo of this theme, clear your cookies or click here.

License: The TL Tweets theme is licensed under the GPL, including PHP, HTML, and CSS.

P.S. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter if you don’t already: @themelab

Related posts:

1. How To Create a Searchable Tweet Archive with WordPress
2. Simply AIO – Free WordPress Theme
3. RS14 – Free WordPress Theme

Late last year, I asked whether child themes should be listed on WordPress.org. Today at WordCamp Savannah, Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) announced that he would be releasing a couple of his old blog designs as free WordPress themes in the WordPress.org theme directory.

One of the sentences in Matt’s announcement post caught my eye.

The second theme, Mazeld, is actually the last from-scratch original design I did here on Ma.tt (then photomatt.net) and is built as a 2010 child theme.

I downloaded the Mazeld theme from WordPress.org and confirmed it was indeed a Twenty Ten child theme (as the stylesheet has the line “Template: twentyten” present) and tweeted Matt for further clarification.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, there has been a child theme sighting on WordPress.org theme directory although judging from Matt’s response, it doesn’t seem to be currently possible to submit them until the installer and UI are fixed.

Hopefully child theme inclusion in the WordPress.org directory will be a reality for theme developers very soon, this is definitely a big step in the right direction.

Related posts:

1. Should Child Themes Be Listed on WordPress.org?
2. Monochromatic – A Thematic Child Theme
3. Compact Child Themes – Black and White

A little over a month ago, I recommended to use the TweetMeme WordPress plugin to get more retweets on your posts.

A few days ago, Twitter announced their own button for retweeting. Several methods of integrating the official Tweet button in your WordPress sites have already emerged.

WordPress Plugins

The first Twitter button WordPress plugin I came across was from Blogsessive.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the options integrate all of the options you’d expect from a Twitter button WordPress plugin, with no extraneous features. You can download it from the post linked to above.

After this a few others popped up on the WordPress.org plugin directory:

• Twitter Button by Svilen Popov
• TweetButton by David R. Davis, Jr.

The Manual Way

Twitter has provided a number of ways to include the Tweet button on your own pages. The most straightforward option is through this customizable form where you can define the type of button, a custom URL, the tweet text, language, and recommended Twitter users.

Let’s take a look at the code that is produced after I input a few sample values.

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button"
data-url="http://example.com/permalink-url/"
data-text="Title of page goes here"
data-count="vertical"
data-via="themelab"
data-related="lelandf:My personal account">Tweet</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

Let’s go through this line by line.

• First Line: Basically just opens the link and adds a CSS class.
• Second line: data-url is used to input a link, probably the permalink of your post.
• Third line: data-text is used for the tweet text, probably the title of your post.
• Fourth line: data-count is used to define which type of button: vertical, horizontal, or none
• Fifth line: data-via is used in the @mention in the tweet, probably your own Twitter account.
• Sixth line: data-related allows you to define another Twitter account with a custom description.
• Last line: Basically just closes the link and adds an obligatory line of javascript.

I’d recommend playing around with the button code generator to get a better feel of all the different options.

Inserting into WordPress

Let’s revisit the above code and insert some dynamic WordPress template tags into it for the permalink and title.

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button"
data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
data-text="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"
data-count="vertical"
data-via="themelab"
data-related="lelandf:My personal account">Tweet</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

This code can be inserted into pretty much any template file you want, including index.php for the main index, single.php for individual blog posts, page.php for static pages, and more.

For styling purposes, you’ll probably want to place the code above <?php the_content(); ?> and use something like the following CSS code to style it.

.twitter-share-button { float: right; margin-left: 10px; display: inline-block; }

More Advanced Usage

For more advanced usage of the Twitter button, have a look at this page on the Twitter developers site. Twitter actually allows you to “build your own Tweet button” (see the bottom of the page) which makes it a lot more customizable than the TweetMeme button.

Conclusion

For some more information on the tweet button, there is a good article entitled 7 Reasons Not to Use the New Tweet Button by Andy Beard. In the comments, a Twitter developer responds to the reasons.

You’ll also noticed I have not myself switched to the official Twitter button and am still using the TweetMeme button. The reason why I haven’t switched is because I don’t see any pressing need to switch to the official version yet, the TweetMeme still works fine.

If you’ve noticed on Twitter, I have been tweeting a lot about the tweet button. After tweeting the link to this post about getting more retweets with the official Twitter tweet button, that will probably be my last tweet on the tweet matter.

Related posts:

1. Want More Retweets? Use the TweetMeme WordPress Plugin
2. Make A Custom Twitter Widget Without A Plugin
3. Social Bookmarking with WordPress

A few days ago, Alex King announced a new WordPress product called Carrington Build. It is described as a “better way to manage WordPress content” and allows users to create custom page layouts without any programming knowledge.

For a better visual of how it works, check out this 1:21 intro video.

Read on to see my review, along with a screencast, information on pricing, and some other thoughts.

Screencast

You probably got a good idea of how Carrington Build works from the video above, but here’s a screencast from me.

How To Get It

I should clarify now that Carrington Build is not free. The pricing structure is a bit complicated so Alex King dedicated an entire post on the topic.

Here are the pricing options:

• Carrington Business Theme – A theme which showcases Carrington Build. This is designed for end users and is priced at $149.
• Carrington Build Developer Edition – This option is designed for developers working on paid client projects, and is used on a single site and is priced at $499.
• Carrington Build Royalty Edition – This option allows commercial WordPress theme or plugin developers to include Carrington Build in their products. It is priced at $15 or 10% of each sale.

Carrington Build isn’t a typical WordPress plugin or theme, and the pricing obviously reflects that being much more expensive than pretty much any other commercial WordPress product I’ve seen.

Commercial Themers?

I have to admit, the most interesting option on the pricing structure would be the “Carrington Build Royalty Edition” which allows other commercial developers to integrate Build into their themes or plugins.

I wonder when we’ll start seeing “Carrington Build-friendly” themes being sold? Most popular commercial themes already do include different page layouts, however nothing close to the flexibility of something like Carrington Build.

Integrating Carrington Build into already great themes would add instant value and allow users to customize their sites with nearly unprecedented flexibility.

Maybe even popular and established theme frameworks like Genesis by StudioPress could get in the game by developing something like a “sample child theme” which integrates Carrington Build into it.

This way, users who wanted the added Build functionality could purchase the child theme as an addon, more sales for the commercial theme company, times $15 back to Crowd Favorite. Everyone wins.

I’d imagine the new child theme route would be the best for already established commercial theme frameworks as it might be kind of tricky to offer a new version of the original framework with Build considering a lot of commercial theme companies offer free upgrades, and you’d probably need to pay Crowd Favorite a ton of money upfront for something not every user might want or need.

iThemes Builder

When I first heard of Carrington Build, the first thing I thought of was the undeniable similarity with another popular WordPress product, iThemes’ Builder theme.

I’m not sure if these two products would play nice together. My first thought was both of them combined would be a bit redundant as they both seem to have a similar “building block” stacking style.

Benjamin Bradley tweeted some differing thoughts on an iThemes Builder + Carrington Build combination.

For more information, check out my Builder theme review (there’s a screencast too).

Conclusion

First of all I want to note that I was not asked or solicited in any way to do a review on Carrington Build. I realize it’s a paid product and it may not be for everyone but I genuinely thought it was a really cool WordPress innovation and wanted to share it with my readers.

• Will it revolutionize WordPress theme development?
• Do you think it will be integrated in other commercial WordPress products sooner or later?
• Would you use something like this for your clients and would they find value in this?
• Would you use Carrington Build on your own personal sites or is pricing too much of a deterrent?

I’d really love to hear your thoughts on Carrington Build in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Commercial WordPress Theme Directory Launches
2. Builder Theme by iThemes – WordPress Theme Review
3. PowerTheme Premium WordPress Themes

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.

Related posts:

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?

Related posts:

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

Update: The contest is now over, and the winners have been chosen.

I left a little hint at the end of my last post, and to some this may not be a surprise to you, but to any Theme Lab is three years old today! It’s exactly three years after the first post here.

In the past year, lots was accomplished. Most notably, a new design, along with several new free theme releases and various coding tutorials and tips.

I wanted to celebrate the third birthday with a giveaway, so I contacted a select few of the leaders in the commercial WordPress product arena to donate three of each of their respective flagship product.

Giveaway Inspiration

My inspiration for this giveaway is pretty much all thanks to a tweet from @bradleypotter.

Note: Genesis 1.2.1 was released yesterday. Contest winners will receive the latest version.

So I thought, those prizes would be perfect for a giveaway. And there should be three of each, since it’s Theme Lab’s third birthday, it would only be fitting. But I didn’t stop there.

The Prizes

Three lucky winners will win each of the following:

• 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

*This is actually a $39 coupon which could be used towards a Gravity Forms multi-site or dev license as well.

Check out the screencast below for a more in-depth overview of the various prizes.

And as promised, here’s my BackupBuddy WordPress plugin review.

How To Enter

I said in the video the giveaway would be like the previous giveaways here. I have since decided to use Tweetaways so you don’t have to leave a comment here to enter the contest.

• Make a tweet with the phrase “Rocking for 3 years” and “@themelab”
• More happy birthday wishes are welcomed, but not required.

Note: You have to use the exact phrase “Rocking for 3 years” because it’s how Tweetaways keeps track of the entries. And also make sure to put “@themelab” somewhere in your message. This is the bare minimum of an acceptable entry.

On Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST this content will be closed to new entries, and I’ll pick three winners (besides me) at random.

It would help if you followed me (@themelab) so we can communicate via direct message if you’re one of the three winners.

Conclusion

Time has really flown by. I’m using Tweetaways for the contest so in the comments, feel free to sound off with feedback of Theme Lab over the past few years. What do you think of the content? What do you think could be improved? I’d love to hear about it.

Related posts:

1. Three-For-All Giveaway Winners Chosen
2. BackupBuddy Contest Winners Announced
3. Theme Lab is 2 Years Old – Another Year In Review