Tag Archives: Thematic

10.28.11
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TwentyEleven Child Themes

Yesterday I was perusing one of the WordPress feeds that I follow and saw a mention of WordPress and Responsive design.  In a nutshell, Responsive Design means that the theme will work well on a variety of displays from large screens to laptops to Tablets (e.g. iPad), to SmartPhones (e.g. iPhone).  Since I own both an iPhone and iPad, I was intrigued by the presentation.

I haven’t had time to watch the whole video yet but later in the day I started playing around with a TwentyEleven child theme thinking it might be a good basis for a new Soccer Team site I am playing around with. I had planned to use Thematic but the more I think about it, the more I want to make sure that whatever I do will be easy to keep up to date and actual be a minimal amount of code.  A TwentyEleven child theme may just be the ticket.

While there is a lot to like in TwentyEleven, I really dislike the way the header is constructed.  So far it doesn’t look like it is easily overridden with filters and hooks either.  I hope I am wrong but that is my perception after looking through some code and several Google searches.

09.20.11
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Child theme or not? That is the question …

Off and on over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a Thematic child theme.  I’ve always had a hesitation with child themes in that you need the parent theme in order for the child theme to work.  Duh.  While it may be pretty obvious to anyone who is familiar with WordPress, it isn’t so for the casual user.

When I was working with Sandbox I figured out a way to essentially build a child theme while ensuring that the parent theme dependency wasn’t an issue by including all of the Sandbox code  using a SVN external reference to Sandbox and some other tricks to include the code.  It worked well and I was able to distribute my themes without concern as to whether or not Sandbox was installed.  It simply didn’t matter.

I was not planning to do that with the Thematic child theme I am working on right now but am having second thoughts.  It turns out that the version of Thematic that I need (0.9.8) is not the version which is in the WordPress Theme Repository and I have no idea when this will change.

If I got the SVN external route again I can ensure that my child theme will work with a known revision of Thematic.  However, it is a fundamental shift in my approach and I don’t know if it will work the same way I did it with Sandbox.  Decisions, decisions.

It looks like there have been some recent commits to the Thematic SVN repository so maybe it will be updated and released soon.  That would help address my dilemma.

08.24.11
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Moving forward with Thematic

I haven’t had much time to work on any of my theme projects but in the last week or so I’ve been trying spend some free cycles on something I am called “Middle School – High School Boosters Club” theme.

My wife is the president of our Middle School Boosters Club this year and much like the swim team was years ago when I got involved, the Boosters Club has no web presence and just about everything is done on paper.  Bleh.  She has asked me to build a web site for the Boosters Club so I am  using it as an opportunity to choose a new theme framework (I’ve settled on Thematic) and see how much stuff I can leverage from Google Apps to build them a solution that doesn’t require me to babysit it all the time. We’ll see how that goes!

As I noted in a prior post, the Wicked WordPress Themes book has been a good resource to get me going with Thematic.  I also found a Thematic Child Theme called Byty which caught my eye and I decided I wanted something similar.  The downside of Byty is a lot of the nice gradient effects have been achieved with images as opposed to CSS.  That is understandable as gradients were not available until CSS3.  However, I want whatever I build to be fairly modern so I’ve decided to go down the CSS3 route.

I am specifically not building a theme for our school but instead and building one which can be tailored for any school by selecting a color scheme.  We’ll see how well I accomplish that!  These are some of the requirements that I am working against which I suspect would be similar for any other school boosters club that may want a web site.

  1. Online Store with PayPal/Credit Card Payments
  2. Support for Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages
  3. Color schemes
  4. Custom Logo(s)
  5. Calendar(s) for game and practice schedules
  6. Sport specific pages featuring just the posts relevant to that sport

Since Google Calendar is dead simple to use and with so many people using Gmail already, it seemed like the logical choice to base the calendar solution on.  Google Apps is free for organizations like a boosters club to  use to registering our domain with Google Apps was the first thing I did.  This also makes it easy to create e-mail accounts for the various people associated with the club (president, secretary, etc.) so they can perform their task without polluting their personal email.

Once Google Apps was configured, I created a Calendar for each of the sports we will support (Football, Volleyball, Boys and Girls Soccer, Softball, Boys and Girls Basketball, etc.).  These calendars can be viewed separately or combined making it easy to view the whole calendar or just the calendar for a specific sport.  Even better, WordPress supports Google Calendar vias oEmbed turning a Google Calendar URL into a Gcal short code!  About the only downside I have found so far is it is very hard to style the Google Calendar, I’d really like the light blue Google uses to be a different color to match the rest of the site but I will live with it based on how easy managing the calendar will be!

I’ve decided to use Simple Twitter Connect and Simple Facebook Connect, both from Otto, for Twitter and Facebook integration.  I’ve used them before so they were familiar to me.  Based on the recommendation from the Wicked WordPress  Themes, I also tried AddThis but it is a  bit more invasive than I want so I went back to SFC and STC.

For an online shop, I am going with eShop which is a very simple shopping cart plugin.  Since we’re selling just a few items (e.g. t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.), we don’t need anything complex and eShop looks like it will do what we need.

The site isn’t online yet so there isn’t anything to see but hopefully I will have a demo up and running fairly soon.  I need to do some more CSS work and get the custom page loops I want.  I am impressed with how easy Thematic has been to work with.

07.24.11
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Looking at Thematic for new projects

I built a number of WordPress themes based on the Sandbox theme.  Unfortunately I think it is time to migrate to a new theme framework.  I need to update a couple themes and I’ve been putting it off knowing that continuing to invest in Sandbox was probably a dead end.

After reading a bit and finding a book I like, Wicked WordPress Themes, I’ve decided to develop a child theme based on Thematic for my Middle School web project.  I should have bought the book from Amazon.com, it was $15 cheaper than my local Barnes and Noble but I wanted it immediately.