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
Some people are never satisfied. They liked the Super Simple Random Header Image but they wanted more . They wanted the header images to change every 10-15 seconds without having to refresh the page. So after a little head scratching and searching I’ve found the solution. This tutorial will be aimed at Artisteer generated themes, but it will work for virtually any WordPress theme. This will also only work with Artisteer themes with square header images. Rounded headers have two images, a .png that provides the round corners and a .jpg that is positioned on top. The first thing you need... Read more
