I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve created a new site with a fabulous (at least I think so) new product. It’s the first Artisteer program add-on. I tried to take all the things that Artisteer owners want and wrap it all up in a nice package that drops right into the Artisteer program. I think the two biggest enhancements are being able to add a linked logo image with a widgetized header and the ability to modify all of the default navigation options. I even added a couple extra features to the vertical navigation. Now you can name it anything you want or you can completely... Read more
I’ve been playing around with the new beta version of Wordpress 3.0 and discovered a technique for having different headers for each page or post. The best part is that it will work with v2.9.2 so you don’t have to wait for v3.0 to come out. This technique comes out of the new twentyten theme and is very easy to implement into your Artisteer created theme. The first thing that needs to be done is to enable the new post_thumbnail function (if it isn’t already enabled). Open your functions.php file and add this to the top right after the opening PHP declaration… // add post_thumbnail... Read more
When Artisteer 2.4 came out some of the usual techniques for styling the page changed. Especially when dropping a wide sidebar area over an existing double sidebar. The folks at Artisteer decided to change how the page was styled by using the dispay:table selector. That was a real head scratcher because I can’t remember ever seeing it used in that way. After playing around for a bit I gave up because I had better things to do. Anyway about an hour ago I was doing something completely unrelated and all of a sudden the light bulb came on. It was a 10 minute job and I had a working wide sidebar. So... Read more
I’ve been playing around with the beta release of Wordpress 3.0 lately and really like the new navigation menu. It’s very slick. Anyway, I wanted to make see if I could make the new nav menu work with the styling of my Artisteer menu. After fooling around for a couple of hours I got it working and it turned out to be easier than I thought. I now have a cool menu that can have any combination of pages, categories and even external links. The first thing that needs to be done is to make the theme aware of the nav-menu. Open the functions.php file in your favorite editor. Right after the... Read more
I’ve modified a lot of themes made with Artisteer. It took awhile to figure out how all of the pieces of the theme worked together. Along the way I started documenting my discoveries. So here it is. The anatomy of an Artisteer theme in PDF format. more »
When you start designing Wordpress themes it becomes a real hassle to constantly upload files to your web server to see if your latest tweak did what you wanted it to. And what happens when your latest modification messes things up and your live site is non functional? What you need is your very own web server. All of the individual applications are available, Apache , PHP and mySQL. But putting all of the pieces together is a real challenge. Now you can set up your own web server on your local computer with just one application that includes everything you need. You can do all of your theme... Read more
