I haven’t been satisfied with The Rhetoric’s theme for a long time and have been intending to design/develop my own from scratch. In the past I’ve always selected a well-designed theme and modifying it to meet my needs.

To prepare myself for this adventure I read the WordPress Codex sections about theme development. I also read the applicable chapters of WordPress 2.7 Complete: Create Your Own Complete Blog or Website from Scratch with WordPress by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder.

Yesterday I spent a long time in Photoshop doing design mock-up. The early stages were frustrating and a bit humorous as the design shifted wildly and often in not-so-good directions. I was only vaguely sure of what I wanted; I know I want a fairly simple and clean design that fits my personality.

Design mockup - The Rhetoric

This afternoon I readied a local sandbox for theme/plugin development: I created a MySQL database with a copy of data from this blog for testing, installed and configured WordPress, and created a folder to hold the files for the new theme. A development sandbox allows me to play around with the new design without confusing and annoying the visitors of the live blog.

When the new theme is done I’m going to create several custom plugins. That should be fun, too.

Then I’ll update my resume.

codex · custom · mysql · php · plugin · theme · wordpress

Tweeting is nice because it’s terse; I can update my tweeps about what I’m doing, resources I’ve discovered and articles I’ve read between more lengthy and media-rich blog posts (and to publicize those posts).

The Twitter Tools plugin is a great way to integrate tweets into a WordPress blog. The most obvious benefit of this is that it keeps the content on the blog page fresh and allows bloggers to communicate bitlets of information that do not require their own post.

In addition to other worthwhile features, Twitter Tools allows a blog admin to display recent tweets in a sidebar widget, and to automatically publish tweets in a daily or weekly digest format. Twitter Tools caches tweets in a table of the WordPress database to reduce the number of calls to Twitter.

There were a few things about the plugin I didn’t particularly like out of the box. First, there was a link below the last tweet in the sidebar widget to take a visitor to my Twitter page. I prefer to have the widget title be that link. Second, the digest post title date format was ugly: “2009-06-29″ instead of “June 29, 2009″. Third, the link at the end of each tweet in the digest post had a simple ‘#’ instead of the date and time of the tweet, which also serves as a link to the original tweet.

(more…)

development · php · plugin · programming · social networking · twitter · wordpress