Hey Now, I am happy to announce version 1.2 of the Blue Meanie free WordPress theme. Blue Meanie is a free theme that Conlan and I released about a year ago - and it needed some attention… It’s a variable width, liquid layout, stretchable type theme that I’ve always liked and judging by the number of support questions I get about it - it’s fairly popular.
Sometimes I still get to do very fun WordPress themes - in between the corporate WP theme design and the people that want a clean, minimal WordPress theme I get a client or two who wants something fun and gives me a little room to create something.
That’s exactly what Jeff over at People You’ll See in Hell did, he gave me some time and creative freedom and we created something that we both liked. His dedicated audience has been decidedly positive as well.
The Heckerped WordPress theme is now stable and is available in a free creative commons attribution version as well as a licensed version for $35. This is my favorite of all of the 2 column free themes that I have done over the last few years.
A number of big-time coders like The Ninja have had a hard-on for the WordPress codebase. I cannot count the times that I have been faced with geeks explaining to me that WordPress, and even more so, WordPress MU were just not suitable for high profile sites….
I think times, they are a changing. CNN Political Blogs are now using MU, and the blogs at ZDNet are using some flavor of WordPress.
Silent Bob blogs with WordPress, that should be enough for the Ninja by itself. Yahoo is using WordPress ( I know because they asked me to work with them on a WP project once, but that is another story…) and Sony trusts the PlayStation blog to WordPress.
Rolling Stone, NewYork Times, Delta Airlines? Check.
I am admittedly biased, but I think if these big-timers can trust their sites to WordPress, we can too.
One of the most powerful, but under-used features in WordPress is the Custom Fields features.
WordPress says:
WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data.
You can find the Custom Field entry form near the bottom of the Create New Post section of the administration backend, but to use it you will need to hack up your WordPress theme somewhat to get the data to show up. The data itself can be just about anything - your current location, mood, etc. - I have used it in the past so a client could include a photo thumbnail in each post at a specific place in his WordPress theme that was not possible through the standard post form.
This is the code that I used to impleiment the custom thumbnail:
<?php //get article_image (custom field) ?>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘article_image’, true); ?>
<img src="<?php echo $image; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />
My suggestion is that you check out the WordPress codex about the custom field but don’t get bogged down in the examples that they show you. You can do almost anything with this data so get creative and start using the WordPress Custom Fields!
I know, I know, back to back WordPress plugin posts, but the incomparable Phil Gerbyshak turned me on to yet another WordPress plugin that I managed to overlook somehow.
ilfilosofo’s WordPress Database Backup Plugin is very cool - you can schedule WordPress to email your database to you, save it to your server, or download it to your computer. I know that you can backup your database yourself but you have to remember to do it - this plugin relieves you of that responsibility.
I used to use ilfilosofo homepage plugin before WordPress decided to make that a core function, but I missed this plugin, which makes me wonder, what other great WordPress plugins are out there that I have overlooked…
I was looking for a more reliable plugin to show You Tube videos inside of WordPress, what I found was a whole lot more:
Anarchy Media Player 2.0 for WordPress, WordPressMu and Standalone Javascript will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page. The WordPress versions also add buttons to the Rich Text Editor for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players.
I am not sure how I overlooked this plugin for so long, but it seems to be damn good - and - it works with WordPress MU, and there is a stand alone javascript version for you WordPress impaired people. Yes, it is hacked together, but it is hacked together well…
Allright, maybe not your mom, but one day my mom was doing her etsy thing and she read an article that was talking about how blogs can be an excellent marketing vehicle to get more people interested in your auctions and etsy sales.
I think this prompted her to get interested in what exactly I did for a living 
My mom sells a ton of stuff on ebay and etsy and has her own store here on the square in our little town, and now she wants a blog - and knows at least that I do something for a living that has something to do with that word.
So one night I went over and gave her the 30 minute WordPress tutorial and she caught on rather quickly and started writing some pretty good content. She was being very patient but I could tell that she wanted the custom theme that I had promised her done because she was so excited about WordPress.
So even though I am very busy creating custom WordPress themes for paying clients, I worked her theme in - I think it turned out well.
I think that one of the hardest things for new designers to learn when they try and make a living doing design is that it really does not matter what you, the designer, think is good.
It really only matter what the client wants - you can try and use your knowledge of form, function, color, and creativity to nudge the client in the right direction, but in the end a for hire design job is only really successful if the client thinks that they have gotten a good value and are happy with the results.
Take, for instance, my latest project for an awesome photographer out on the left coast named melissa schwartz.. She is a WPJA award winning wedding photojournalist and has a distinct style - and a design style that is not exactly what I would do if it were left up to me.
But her custom WordPress theme is not about me, it’s about her. So after being warned that she was an artist and had strong opinions about how the blog should look I tried to remove my own bias from process and created her a mock up. This is what she said:
i’m kind of shocked…i love it! i’m usually really difficult to please =)
I admit that I was kinda shocked as well, I was prepared to have it ripped to pieces and heading back to the drawing board. I went ahead and starting cutting it up, helped her install WordPress and got the theme set up and she said:
i think it’s amazing, it looks awesome, you rock.
Not bad coming from a client that told me up front that she was going to be hard to please - but, I think, that by trying to remove my ego from the design process that she actually became easy to please.
Last week I whipped out a cool blog theme for a great guy named Marc over at My Credit Group. While this design is not necessarily my favorite style is is exactly what the client wanted, and therefore, a successful project.
I normally don’t blog each WordPress Theme I create ( otherwise that is all this blog would be about ) but this blog may be special - but not because of anything that I’ve done. I think this blog has the potential to have the best content created by the client of any theme that I have ever designed.
Marc has some great credit related content over there, not just the standard fluff, and it looks like there is a nice discussion building around his timely topics.
So if are interested in this type of thing, I highly recommend that you check it out.