The uploader we’re going to be using later saves the image URL to a custom field, so first we’re going to get the custom field set up so that all you have to do is input a URL into the custom field and it gets displayed as the background. As I’ve shown before, it’s fairly easy:

<?php
$bg = get_post_custom_values("background");
if ( is_array($bg) ) { ?>

<style type="text/css" media="screen">

body{ background: url(<?php echo $bg ?>) fixed no-repeat; }

</style>

<?php } ?>

But that still means you’ve got to resize the image and copy out the URL into a custom field.

Custom meta uploader

We need an uploader in a meta box. When I was first pondering how to do this, I remembered that WooThemes use(d to use?) them in their themes. So I opened up one and lo and behold, there was a file admin-custom.php (under /functions). This is the bit used for the uploader and other custom meta boxes.

At this point I got slightly confused – at the top of the file it says:

This code is protected under Creative Commons License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Which is completely contradictory to Woo being GPL and as the file is dependant on WordPress, I’m fairly sure it needs to be GPL too. Either way, as I see it I can still publish the code here. To be totally safe, I’m not going to “alter, transform, or build upon this work”. This does mean we’ve got some code we don’t strictly need, but it won’t have too much of a disastrous effect!

As it’s a fairly big file, you can download it here.

Once you’ve got the file, copy the whole thing into your functions.php file, making sure it goes directly after the closing ?> tag (ie ?><?php ).

We then need to trigger the meta box, which can be done with the following:

$woo_metaboxes = array(

		"image" => array (
			"name"		=> "bg",
			"label" 	=> "Background",
            "type" => "upload",
			"desc"      => "Automatically resized/enlarged but at least 1000px x 800px for it to be big enough."
		),

	);

update_option('woo_custom_template',$woo_metaboxes);   

Add that after the other code, but before the closing ?> tag. Save the file, upload it and create a new post. You’ve now got an uploader which will save images into the custom field ‘bg’.

Resizing the images

The final thing to do now is to just use timthumb to resize the images to a width of 1920px. Simple enough; download timthumb, upload it into your theme’s files and just apply the timbthumb syntax to the code in the header:

body{
background: url(<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/tools/timthumb.php?w=1920&zc=1&src=<?php echo $bg; ?>) fixed no-repeat;
}

And as you can see, that… doesn’t work. The custom field adds http://… to the image URL which timthumb doesn’t like.

At this point, I pondered a bit, tried (and failed) at a couple of solutions so did the only thing I could; grovelled with Ben to give me a hand. Thankfully, he agreed and told me I needed to encode my URLs, which means you’ll need to change the code to this:

body{
background: url(<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/tools/timthumb.php?w=1920&zc=1&src=<?php echo urlencode($bg); ?>) fixed no-repeat;
}

And finally

Which leaves us with a really easy to use custom background uploader. You can check it out in action on the new look Nometet! Speaking of which, I’d really appreciate it if you gave the site a look; it’s a web based video game magazine.

WPShift. What’s That?

It’s a new premium themes site, created by myself and Alex Cragg. We’ve created an awesome first theme, ShiftNews. It’s a magazine style theme powered near exclusively by widgets so you can create your own look just by dragging and dropping. We’ve got four widgets for showing off your posts including two featured content sliders, a traditional blog look and a column widget so you can fit your posts side by side. They’re all powered by our awesome widget control panel so you’ve got immense control over where your posts go:

We didn’t stop with the posts widgets; we’ve built in widgets for Twitter, Flickr, Adsense and your social media profiles too.

Sounds cool. What else does it do?

We’ve got a massive options page (click the image below to enlarge) and what I think is the most options you’ll need for getting images from posts. That means you can just upload and image and it’ll grab it, it can find images in posts, it can find images using the post thumbnail feature and you can use custom fields (so you’ve got backwards compatibility with old posts). Of course, this is al then resized dynamically (thanks to Ben).

We’ve got just about everything we think you’d want – huge colour changing options, numerous built in colour schemes, post and page templates and all the features you’d expect from a quality theme – threaded comments and the like, optimisation for load times, optimisation for search engines, our own custom styles for popular plugins (such as PageNavi and YARRP); that kind of thing. The video below shows a bit more:

Speaking of videos, they’re quite literally everywhere in the theme – we’ve embedded them in HD in our custom widgets and we’ve also got one stuck in the options page. That means if you’re stuck then you can find out how to use it without digging through piles of documentation. If you’d prefer to look through the documentation, you’re welcome to too – there’s over 2000 words of it explaining everything I could think of in solid detail. Of course, we’ve also got a support forum where you can come and ask your more pressing questions.

What does it cost?

We’ve kept it at the lower end of the market (price wise. For quality we’re at the top ) and you can buy the single site license for $59.95 which is really good value considering all the great features, updates for life, support and documentation you get included. On the site we’ve tried to make things as easy to use as possible – for example we’ve got a download area where you can download the latest version of your theme and documentation. It’s the little things that should you choose to go with us make us just about perfect .

You might have noticed we’re not fully GPL. All our WordPress dependant code is but design and CSS is not. We chose to do this because it has taken nearly four months to get to this point and we’re not happy with the possibility of people redistributing our hard work for free. I’d think if you’d spent six out of seven evenings for four months working on something, you’d quite probably agree.

Can I has a copy?

Most certainly. Use the code SHIFTLAUNCH to get twenty percent off, making the theme $47.96. You’ll have to be quick though; it’s only valid until Wednesday!

For more information and to see the theme in action, visit the link below.

I think I’ve got everything covered. If I haven’t, feel free to leave a comment with any questions or even better, go and take a look at our theme!

That was the question I asked twenty one WordPress theme designers, developers and bloggers; I wanted to get a good balance – not just the theme developers who everyone has heard about! Their answers are very interesting, to say the least. I asked four and the answers will be published over the next couple of days. The questions are:

Why WordPress?
First question. Why WordPress? Why not Joomla! or Drupal or any of the other CMSes out there?

You have the power
Second question. Hypothetically, you have the power to change one thing in WordPress. What would that be?

Problems
Third. What do you see as the biggest problems facing the WP community at the moment?

The future?
Final question. The future? With just about anything possible with WordPress these days, where do you think the future lies for so ething still widely seen as a blogging platform?

We’ll start with the first question. Why WordPress? In no particular order, here are the responses:

WordPress is the best, that’s simple! Just because it is easier to modify, manage and build anything with it. The fantastic community is also a very good point. WordPress changed my way to work on the internet.
-Jean-Baptiste Jung

Back at the very start? The thing that probably made me choose WordPress over Joomla or anything else was how user-friendly WordPress was. It was so easy to get started with it, anyone can do it!
-Michael Martin

I chose WordPress a long long time ago. Originally I chose it because I wanted a blogging app (and not a cms) and I wanted something that was easy to install and use – and at the time WordPress was the best I found.
-Ben Gillbanks

The reason I chose WordPress is the same reason I continue to publish content through the software and that is through ease of use.

The publishing process in WordPress was simple when compared to Joomla or Drupal. The process is in a logical order and doesn’t provide 100 different things I should do before I actually hit the publish button. This process has been refined in the two years I’ve been using WordPress so it’s even better today!

-Jeff Chandler

Every CMS can be adapted to the needs but with WordPress the efforts needed to extend it is less and making WordPress to act as CMS is pretty damn easy. It is the best Out of the Box CMS available in my opinion.
-Ashfame

WordPress has a very good backend and a flexible API. And it doesn’t use a special template engine like Typo3 or Textpattern.
-Thomas Scholz

The very first site I was involved in used WordPress to publish, so I had to learn to make edits, and as I took over more responsibility, I needed to learn even more. Since then I’ve never looked back, and I find WordPress so flexible that I’ve never had cause to consider another platform.
-Alex Cragg

I didn’t actually choose WordPress originally, I chose b2. Eventually b2 was forked and became WordPress (and included some code I’d contributed to b2). The decision in 2002 was very different than the decision folks face in 2009. WordPress is very different and the other CMS packages have grown as well.

To me it comes down to a pragmatic choice. WordPress typically does much of what we need for a site, and we can teach it to do the rest in a forward-compatible way with the plugin and theme system. Other CMSes are good choices in specific situations as well, there is no “one size fits all” CMS – but WordPress does fit a great many.

-Alex King

I used PHP scripts like CuteNews to run the dynamic parts of the websites I created before, until a friend of mine told me about how great WordPress was. I wasn’t really turned on at first, because I had to build my whole website “around” WordPress e.g. make a theme. This seemed like a hard task, but I fiddled around with the default theme and soon found other free themes to use. The rest is history
-Magnus Jepson

One of the most important things that make WordPress a winner is the fantastic community. While I am very familiar with Drupal and Joomla and have used them in many projects, I prefer to use WordPress especially for my client’s projects due to it’s easy of use. Especially Drupal can be very confusing and Joomla unnecessarily heavy when you need a small website.
-Mike

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So there we are. Some really interesting answers there. Question is – Why WordPress? Leave a comment.

1. Use a framework

Initially, like a lot of people, I wasn’t convinced with frameworks. Now I’m totally won over. Frameworks offer you that crucial starting point for WordPress themes and save you coding the same things over and over again. And again. And again. These days the choice is massive – from highly complex frameworks with their own hooks such as Thematic, Hybrid and Prodigy to the more simplistic Biblioteca. Download a couple, find one you like, customise it to your needs. You’ll have doubled your coding time with just a couple of hours’ work.

2. Awesome SEO

These days bloggers care more and more about having “awesome SEO”. Understandably too. Theme authors are picking up on this too and increasingly themes are being released marketed with said “awesome SEO”. Thanks to the GPL, many of these themes are actually using the same code! As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, write great content, use your Header tags correctly and use the <title> tag effectively and you’ll be fine – for more SEO tips, check out “10 Ways to Improve Your WordPress Theme’s SEO“.

3. Use an advanced theme options page

Again thanks to the GPL, theme options pages, once found only in a select few themes, are now found pretty much everywhere. Creating your own options page isn’t that hard (and needn’t be hard either) – recently WPShout ran “Create an Advanced Theme Options Page” in which, as you might have guessed, we created an advanced theme options page with options such as changing the stylesheet and various other areas of the theme.

4. Don’t use custom fields unneccesarily

Whilst I do love custom fields, I don’t love using them unneccesarily. If you’re making a magazine theme such as the one used on WPShout, you needn’t use custom fields to display images on the homepage or the like (and all this won’t be needed at all with WordPress 2.9 – read more about it here). As WebDeveloperPlus points out, WordPress creates its own thumbnails that can be relatively easily used by any theme using the wp_get_attachment_thumb_url function (codex).

5. Custom write fields!

I do love these. Custom write fields. They’re essentially adding little boxes onto the bottom of the post writing area in WordPress. And they’re brilliant. On WPShout I’m running a child theme of Biblioteca and so have a box “Post options” that lets me change the post’s <title>, meta description and set one of two featured images. Adding these custom write fields to a theme is relatively easy with this tutorial I wrote a while ago. With them up and running, you can now offer a number of options and replace plugins such as the “All in one SEO plugin”. Awesome, no?!

6. Use the template hierarchy cleverly

WordPress’ template hierarchy is a great thing and you can create something really awesome by using it correctly. Here’s a case study. You’re using WordPress as a CMS for a portfolio site. You want to use category archives to display the latest blog posts and your portfolio which has a different design completely. You would first need to create two categories, “Portfolio” and “Blog” and find their IDs (although 2.9 onwards you can just use the slug of the category). Let’s pretend “Portfolio” has an ID of 3 and “Blog” 4. Next, style your pages and then save the two files not as category.php (as you would for a category archive normally) but as category-3.php and category-4.php. You’ve now just created two category archives that will output posts completely differently! Awesome, no?

7. Custom widgets

Custom widgets are the next big thing. That’s for sure. Get ahead of the game by including custom widgets in their theme and subscribe by RSS to WPShout as soon I’ll be writing a tutorial on how to create your own awesome widget.

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8. Use sticky posts efficiently and effectively

Used effectively and effectively, you can do a lot of awesome stuff with sticky posts. A number of examples. First, say we just want to highlight sticky posts. With WordPress 2.7′s post_class you can do this by adding some styling for .sticky . The full code would be something like:

<?php if(have_posts()) : while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div <?php post_class(); ?>>
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

And with CSS styling:

.sticky{
     background:yellow;
}

As you can see, pretty simple (inspiration for this from Shades of Blue). Taking this further though, you could single out sticky posts and use them instead of that blasted “Featured” category! Mimbo does this particularly well, outputting first a single sticky post and then a seperate loop with the next X posts, excluding the first:

 <?php
	$postCount = 0;
	$page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
	query_posts( 'paged=$page&post_per_page=-1&cat=' . get_query_var('cat') );
	while (have_posts()) { the_post();
		if( $postcount == 0 ) {
		//GETS LATEST OR STICKY POST
	?>

<!-- do stuff -->    

		<?php
		}
		elseif( $postcount > 0 && $postcount <= 4 ) {
		//GETS NEXT FOUR EXCERPTS
		?>

<!-- do more stuff -->

<?php endif; endwhile; ?>

9. Multiple sidebars and layouts

An increasing trend this that is done especially well on BinaryMoon.co.uk – having two sidebars – one that gets displayed on the homepage and another that gets displayed in posts:

An effect such as this is quite easy to do with the right template hierarchy. First, create two sidebars and save them as sidebar.php and sidebar-single.php. Next, open up the functions.php file and add the following:

<?php if ( function_exists ('register_sidebar')) {
    register_sidebar ('single');
} ?>

Next, open up the single.php file and change to . And you’re done. This is assuming that you want to keep the homepage sidebar on archives. If not, do it the other way round (ie sidebar-home.php). Read more on this at the codex.

10. Custom YARRP templates

I do love this tip from Alex Cragg – custom templates for the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Using jQuery, Alex created a YARRP template that changes the image as you hover over different posts. Check out the demo here and download the templates here.

And with that, we’re done. Hopefully you’ve now got yourself an awesome WordPress theme! If you’ve enjoyed this post, why not [f] or subscribe by RSS?

Creating a WordPress theme options page is something that we’ve touched on before on WPShout, and this week we’ll be expanding on what we covered before to create not just a theme options page, but an advanced theme options page; we’ll be creating something that lets users change layouts, hide and display different elements dotted around the theme, enter ad codes, footer text, tracking codes, Feedburner URLs, anything really:

This is a screen of the options page we’ll be creating over the next couple of days – as you can see, pretty impressive! The plan for the week is as follows:

• Day 1: Introduction
• Day 2: Creating the different options
• Day 3: Styling the options page
• Day 4: Implementing the options into a theme

And that’s pretty much it. Unlike last time there won’t be a free eBook to download at the end of the week, but this is a shorter series at only four days. Throughout the week you’ll be most welcome to ask any questions etc etc through the comments, and I’d ask if you’re going to save the series to any social media site then please save this post. The code for the tutorial series comes from my WordPress theme framework, Biblioteca (that in turn is based on Thematic’s options page). We offer you incredible online training for all kind of certifications including mcitp as well as mcts and a+ certification.

That’s all the admin stuff out the way, so subscribe by RSS, save this post to Delicious and grab a cup of tea. It’s going to be an interesting week.