Add the viewport meta tag with a WordPress hook via your theme’s functions file to allow responsive web design and mobile-friendly themes
With all the responsive web design activity over the past few years, I hope that any theme or site we work on we’re able to make responsive to some extent. An important part of making a web site responsive is adding a viewport meta tag to your html. Without explicitly stating our viewport, the mobile browsers will scale down the website to fit into their ‘viewport’. This is a good thing, since if it was a full website and the browser didn’t scale it down, you’d only see the top left corner, or some small section of the site. This viewport was introduced by apple for iOS and has spread to most mobile devices since. There are viewport properties or parameters we can set with this meta tag such as width and scale and can even use some device aware variables (like ‘device-width’) to set these values.
A WordPress Meta Viewport Hook
I usually end up using the following hook to add a viewport meta tag to my head in wordpress. I set the viewport width to match the width of the device. Then I set the initial scale to 1. Some go and set the maximum-scale to 1 as well. This would prevent users from zooming in on your site. I advocate that we should allow users to zoom if they wish since it is a gesture they may be used to and may still need (no matter how nice your RWD is, they may need/want to see it bigger). RWD is about giving the user a better layout for whatever device they are on, not restricting how they view it.
[cc lang=”php”]
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Add viewport meta tag to head
//
function viewport_meta() {
?>
True developers strive to be DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in code as well as workflow and process. Previously, I somehow ended up doing in many of my projects things that plugins could also do.
It’s great to code your own sometimes and if you have specific needs that aren’t addressed by something out there already then sometimes it’s required. I think there is a lot to be said for the state of the plugin community lately. There are plugins to offer solutions many needs beyond what WP core was built to handle.
I’ve found that many times plugins are better then rolling my own solution. Not because I’m a horrible developer (I hope not at least), but because there is real power in numbers.
First off, plugins benefit form the community or users and developers involved in making them work and making them popular. Choose plugins that have a good base of users so when the author or WordPress ships updates, there are many people reporting/testing compatibility issues.
There is a community of people thinking about how to solve recurring needs and many minds working together on something are smarter than one. This is how I’ve come to terms with paying for plugins for an open source and free platform.
It’s worth the expense in the time I save on projects. (Disclaimer: However, I don’t think we should be using a screwdriver as a hammer simply because we can make it work. If you end up hacking plugins to get what you need out of it, then you may be better off building your own.)
This past year, I resorted to using plugins for a lot of the basic functionality I found myself using over and over again on many sites. I’ve been pleasantly impressed. Here are my top 3 plugins of the year:
1. BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy by iThemes. Backuping up a site is pretty much essential for anyone who does web work professionally. Not only for security but also for moving sites.
As a developer I’m constantly moving a site from a dev environment to a production environment and vice versa. It was the bain of existence at times, because with WP, moving the site is more than just copying files via ftp. It includes the database and config files and settings in the database too.
BackupBuddy, has helped this become a fairly simple process that lets me export the whole site (database and all) into a zip file and then I can easily place the site on a new domain or environment.
Screenshot of starting the migration/import process with backupbuddy. You do a complete backup, load this php file onto your new site and follow the prompts. They’ve made it surprisingly painless.
The huge win for me is that I’m spending less time managing databases and more time building websites. Although I generally tend towards open solutions, this one has been worth the money spent many times over. (Even when they had an update that broke my database, it still saved me time in the end).
I mainly use this tool to schedule and automate my backups and save them remote locations either weekly or daily and to move my site between dev and production environments for testing and deploying.
2. GravityForms
Gravity Forms by RocketGenius. Forms are a part of every website I’ve built lately. I used to use CF7 and still am a big fan, but I ended up trying this form plugin out once and have been very impressed with the UX and UI. It has many features and is tastefully integrated into WordPress.
Some of my favorite features are that it saves the form submissions into my database and I can send complex notifications about the submission. It also has many field types built in. so if I need to capture someones email and shipping address, there are fields that will validate as such automatically!
True, I could write my own script to do this, but why spend unneeded hours to reinvent the wheel, and test the wheel and maintain the wheel.
Here is the back end of gravity forms. This is where you set up or edit your form. Notice the fields you can select from the right to add to any form as fast as you can drag and drop.
There are many many plugins offered to enhance the gravity form as well, you can integrate easily with MailChimp, Paypal and WordPress itself (for creating user accounts or even content).
I’ve used gravity forms as a simple contact form, as a job application form, as a donate form, newsletter signup form and more. It’s nice to be able to rely on one plugin for all this. The support forum has always been helpful as well.
3. Advanced Custom Fields
Best for last in my list is Advanced Custom Fields by Australian, Elliot Codon. The plugin site lists many add-on plugins that extend the functionality. Hopefully you’ve heard of custom fields in WordPress already, and if not, they are extra data about the post (or whatever type of content you create with custom post types).
You can add an external link, a price, an address or anything you can think of. This isn’t too hard to do in a theme or plugin on your own and has been documented and tutorial-ized many times explaining how to create fields and saving them to the database and grabbing them from the databse… but it does get tedious.
And then there are all the different types of data you may want to store that you end up having to reprogram every time. Text and numeric values are simple enough, but what about a date, an address, an image or a relationship.
Here’s the interface when adding custom fields. You can easily choose the type of data you need and there are multiple options to configure to your situation.
This plugin makes it not only easy, but fun to create custom fields. It adds easy functions for php to grab the data you need at the template level and the UI is entirely seamless with WP. There are many options for conditionally including or requiring the custom fields in the post edit screen etc.
I think this plugin truly transforms WordPress into an open minded CMS with style. Mad props for it not being added to the list of premium plugins (although some add-ons are for sale). I’d vote for this being added to WP Core and won’t likely work on another custom field project without it.
Progress
In all, it’s been a great year to be working with WordPress and it’s only getting better! I’m excited for the number of plugins that are getting better all the time geared towards easing the process of building sites. Equally exciting is the plugin repository at wordpress.org and the recent updates of being able to write reviews for plugins, I think this is a huge step towards letting the cream of the crop rise to the top allowing users and developers alike to find (and support) the best plugins out there.
What plugins have you found that don’t just save you an hour or add a bit of functionality, but that transform your workflow and help you live the DRY mantra?
New additions to the plugin directory include: favorites, incorporating support forums into it's own tab for each plugin as well as support stats being displayed! Great!
I think we also need the ability to give plugins ratings and reviews (bonus points if it can be done from within a wordpress admin dashboard when installing plugins).
Embedded Link
Plugin Directory Refreshed
Been hanging out with a few WordPress.org hackers — Scott, Nacin, and Otto — the last few days in a BBQ-fueled haze of hacking to make plugin directory better. There are over 19,000 plugins listed a…
So this is all about writing CPTs into a plugin and not in your theme. Is there a time to not do that and include it into the theme? I'm thinking specifically when you are making the custom theme for the client rather than for stock. The client won't really be changing themes willy nilly, since they paid me to do it. I think separating the code sometimes can make it more complicated. It's not like if they change themes and notice some content is gone they can't change back, since the content isn't actually lost, but no longer supported by other themes. If they are my client and I do maintenance on the site or update the theme, I'd be sure to keep the CPT code in any new theme that is developed. And I'd expect that if someone else was doing the same they'd know where to look and how to continue support for the CPTs. I guess it comes down to the expectation that clients don't really need to be changing the theme. If they knew what they were doing changing themes, then I think they should understand that some functionality may be tied to the theme. Or maybe that's the point. Functionality traditionally has been in themes, and we should be moving away from that?
Personally I think it's easier to tell a client to come to me or at least ask if they want to change the theme (not that I'm locking into being my customer) that it would be for them to figure out some message saying the site requires a theme and a plugin in tandem, while it will still kinda work with one and not the other, it will be incomplete either way. Are we expecting them to be able to change themes, and update to new one to display the CPTs properly?
Embedded Link
Theme-ready Custom Post Types in WordPress – Jumping Duck Media
Good advice on decoupling WordPress Custom Post Type implementation from your themes. How to notify a user that some functionality of the theme might depend on a plugin that defines the CPTs. How to override theme template selection from a plugin. Theme-ready Custom Post Types in WordPress – Jumping Duck Media Original Article: Theme-ready Custom Post Types in WordPress – Jumping Duck Media Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings – WordPress, web development, and world domination.
Here's a great little line of code to put into your wp theme's functions php file: add_filter('jpeg_quality', function($arg){return 100;}); This will make the jpg compression quality full so degradation will be minimal.
[UPDATE] I’m updating this post that originally just contained my slides with the meat of the presentation as well. I don’t think a presentation is expressed well at all with slides. So I’m going to write some things and link to places that I mentioned.
This presentation covers how to get from a photoshop design to a theme in WordPress. The sample theme I use in the presentation is actually live at http://psd2wp.circlecube.com. I’m not trying to teach css or html here. I more wanted to focus on the process I usually go through in creating a site or theme. Let’s work on this PDS template design called Corporate Clean, which was designed and published by Zsolt Kacso. I saw this done by a drupal theme shop and figured the wordpress world could use the same. (Also check out Corporate Clean for Drupal http://drupal.org/project/corporateclean and download the design they link to on that page: http://mttdownloads.s3.amazonaws.com/projects/kaolti/corporateclean_psds.zip)
First, What is a Theme?
It is all the files that control the front-end and visual side of a site. It is all the files that control the front-end and visual side of a site. Major benefit to a theme (or a CMS overall) is separating design and content, which is the goal of standards based web design. Themes are made up of a combination of files: css, html, php, javascript, images…
The basic structure of a theme is usually something like: Header, Content, Aside(s) and Footer.
We know what types of files or templates we need to include in our theme by using the Template Hierarchy is how WordPress determines which template to use on each page. It looks for template files with specific names in the current Theme’s directory and uses the first matching template file listed under the appropriate query section below. (See Joost De Valk’s Anatomy of a WordPress Theme Infographic).
A wordpress specific term that took me a while to get used to was “the loop”
There are many different roads to a WordPress theme.
All themes are not created equal. There are different type and diffrerent qualitiy levels of themes. We can group them into these main areas though (some of which overlap):
Free – benefit, it’s FREE. Only problem is there’s not a great vetting process and a lot of themes out there aren’t good quality themes you’d want on your site (even if they look nice from the front).
Premium – although WP is open source software as in free, not all themes are free, some will cost you.
From Scratch – It is possible to make a theme from the bottom. This could be beneficial if you have something specific you’re not likely to find out there already.
Customized – A direction many take is acquiring a theme (be it free or not) and them customizing it to make it suit them. Not a bad if you’re starting from something that is nicely done, and you know how to get from a to b.
Standalone – Traditionally all themes were standalone packages, and the theme folder will contain all associated files.
Parent-Child – Since WP 2.7 we’ve had the ability to have parent-child relationships in theming! This means that you can have a theme you want to base yours on and separate any modifications you make to it into a “child” theme that will inherit everything else from it’s “parent”.
Frameworks – Frameworks are themes that have been designed to be used as a starting point or a parent theme. Some have feature rich options pages that allow you to build a theme or site from within the WordPress admin. These really help theme developers to avoid repeating the same code in every theme they make. One caveat to this is that if you’re new to WP, you need to learn all the wordpress specific code as well as any additional code for the theme framework . It complicates the learning curve a bit, but it has long term benefits of speed and ease.
My preferred theme route is using a theme framework. My preferred framework is thematic. Thematic is the ultimate in SEO-ready themes, it is a highly extensible framework which features 13 widget-ready areas, drop-down menus, grid-based layout samples, plugin integration, shortcodes for your footer, and a whole lot more. Thematic as of now is about to get a significant update as well. Resources for thematic include forums, guides, diagrams, tutorials, thematic4you …
Before getting into the design, let’s talk one more fundamental wordpress term: hooks
Hooks are spots in the code that are flagged for us to easily customize how our site or theme functions. To visualize, think about all the thousands of lines of code that gets executed to load a page on a site (yes, there are thousands), and think of it like each line of code is like someone in line at the gracery store checkout . They’d be lined up in order of execution. Hooks are like people in the line that are holding a sign allowing you to cut in line at that precise position to run your own code. There are action hooks and filter hooks in wordpress. Action hooks are for executing your own action at that spot in line, and a filter is about changing something in the line right there. Like if you wanted to insert some ad at the end of every post. You could either add an action that would place it there, filter the post content and add it to the content itself (and you could even filter the content before it goes to the database, or before it’s rendered onto the page). More on action and filter hooks here.
Returning to that added complexity of using a framework, many frameworks will add their own hooks on top of the wordpress hooks. So on top of learning any wordpress hooks you also need to learn the ones specific to your chosen framework where you need to access them. So once you get used to using one framework it may be painful to leave and loose and invested learning in that one. Check these diagrams of thematic structure (blue mandela.com and visualizing.thematic4you.com) including hooks for an visual representation. And the thematic guide to filters and hooks.
Getting from a design in photoshop to an actual WordPress (thematic) child theme while trying not to reinvent the wheel.
The Technical – Actually making the theme
Once you install thematic in your wordpress site, look at the theme directory (/wp-content/themes/thematic/) and you’ll see that thematic comes with a ‘thematicsamplechildtheme’. It’s nice that they thought of this, it gives us a great starting place! We copy that folder, rename it to whatever we want, and place it in the theme directory (sibling to thematic itself). Like so:
The thematicsamplechildtheme has 3 files in it: the style.css, functions.php, readme.txt. I added the screenshot.png file (it will automatically get pulled into the backend as the image of the theme) and made some edits to the stylesheet. Later we’ll add all our styles to the css here, but for now we need to understand that the comment block in the file communicates the details of the theme to wordpress. We need to edit the css file so it reflects our theme properly. The block of text in the comment is formated in a specific way that wordpress will read it and it’s actually pretty self explanitory! All we need to do is update the details. Take special notice of the Template line (it’s what tells WordPress that this theme is a child theme using thematic as the parent), here’s what I’ve done:
Once we have this in place, we go to the appearance section in our wordpress dashboard and select our theme. Then we can then make our edits to our stylesheet and see them live on our site!
Before we go opening a can of CSS, let’s look at a couple things and think big picture. We haven’t yet mentioned what this ‘functions.php’ file is. This is the section where we will do any php related to our theme, in other words our hooks! That includes any wordpress or thematic hooks. This samle theme actually has a couple snippets we can uncomment and a sample filter.
Process & Workflow
My purpose in this presentation was never to show you how to slice a photoshop document into web ready images or how to write CSS. I just wanted to help people get more familiar with or started with building themes. I want to talk a little about my process because when I started theming, while I understood the tech (as in css/html) (although I still had and have lots to learn), the process around theming was somewhat of a mystery. I usually follow a loose workflow/cycle when I’m making a site:
Layout – Wireframe, get content areas (widgets) blocked out. Getting the right content in the right places, or creating the right places to put the content.
Structure – Info Archietecture, get the proper post types and think through any needed templates. Getting the right content types. Ideally we should put this code into a theme functionality plugin to separate the functionality from the visual style. Some think it’s best to put that into a plugin so the theme can be changed. But that’s beyond the scope of this presentation, so I’m just going to show you the code to do it and include it in the theme for now.
Style/Design – CSS, using images and styles to get things visual. Getting the right content looking right.
Interactive – JS, making any client-side scripts lively. Getting content interactive.
Population – The plain old and sometimes even boring, data entry.
Rinse and repeat! This is loose and a cycle, I jump through each of these phases numerous times for each element.
Each of these phases contain different tasks, I’ll include some examples and point out some resources. I don’t want to focus on the exact things to do for any and every situation, but talk more about the way to do things. Basically teach to fish, rather than feed you a few fish.
I think I’ll leave that for another day though. This has gotten quite long!
With all the responsive web design activity over the past few years, I hope that any theme or site we work on we’re able to make responsive to some extent. An important part of making a web site responsive is adding a viewport meta tag to your html. Without explicitly stating our viewport, the mobile browsers will scale down the website to fit into their ‘viewport’. This is a good thing, since if it was a full website and the browser didn’t scale it down, you’d only see the top left corner, or some small section of the site. This viewport was introduced by apple for iOS and has spread to most mobile devices since. There are viewport properties or parameters we can set with this meta tag such as width and scale and can even use some device aware variables (like ‘device-width’) to set these values.
