Theme Lab

After a few different people requested Gravatar support in the comments for the popular Choice WordPress theme, I decided to look into it more carefully. I came across this great post by HackWordPress which gives you a small code snippet to add Gravatars to your comments loop. Since then, I’ve been adding Gravatar support to all the themes here, just because it’s so simple to do. In this guide I’ll show you how exactly I integrate Gravatars into themes.

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Sitemaps can be an important factor in making your site more navigable and accessible. And no, I’m not talking about the Google XML Sitemaps which you submit directly directly to Google - never to be seen by human eyes. I’m talking about an actual page on your site that has a list of all your posts and pages. There are a few helpful plugins that can help you out with this. I’ll go over some of them in this guide.

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With the online video industry taking off, you may want to know some easy ways to add video to your WordPress sites. There are several great WordPress plugins for adding video content to your blogs. In this guide I’ll go over:

• Adding your own hosted .flv videos to WordPress
• How to embed videos from video sites such as YouTube

Start adding videos to your WordPress sites today and read on…

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Ever since Adsense updated their terms and conditions, requiring publishers to display a privacy policy on their website(s), webmasters and bloggers alike have been scrambling to comply with the new TOS. Fortunately for WordPress users, there is a quick and easy way to generate an Adsense-compliant privacy policy with just a few clicks.

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Did you know you can display a static page as your front page, instead of the usual blog? In this guide I’ll go over a little known way to do this within WordPress. No plugins or hacks needed (although they might help). You’ll learn the following:

• How to use one of your regular WordPress pages as your front page.
• How to keep a blog on a another page of your site.

It’s pretty simple, let’s read on…

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Like the title says, upgrading WordPress isn’t as difficult as you might think. As long as you don’t have a lot of “core upgrades” i.e. direct edits to WordPress core files, it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes. In this tutorial I’ll show you how in 3-4 simple steps.

• Take a full backup first
• Get the latest version of WordPress
• Overwrite core files
• Run the database upgrade script (if necessary)

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Jeff Chandler wrote a review over at WPCandy of our Nature Blog theme a few days ago. One of the things he said in this review was the following:

I don’t immediately see support for tags but thats something that wouldn’t be too hard to add. However, I think tags should be a default quality in themes these days considering that it’s as simple as adding that function into the theme.

I couldn’t agree more, and since that review I have tried to make sure all of Theme Lab’s future releases have tag support, as well as working on tag support on previous theme releases. In this guide I’ll teach you how to add tag support to your own themes that may not have it. Like Jeff said, it really is “as simple as adding that function to the theme.”

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Let’s face it, not all WordPress themes are coded perfectly (*cough* not even mine *cough*). Theme designers may forget to add little bits of code that may cause undue stress for the theme user.

Poorly coded themes may cause feed readers to not recognize WordPress’ RSS/Atom feeds. They may cause certain plugins to be rendered useless. They can even cause an entire site to break, likely forcing the WordPress user to switch back to an older theme.

In this tutorial I’ll go over 5 things some theme users and designers alike can do to fix common WordPress theme related issues.

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Making your themes widget-ready really isn’t as difficult as you might think. Widgetizing your theme usually involves making your sidebar items widget-ready. I go over what exactly a widget-ready theme is in a previous article. If you have a theme coded in clean CSS, it could even take 5 minutes or less, and I’ll show you how.

• Making sure your theme is “widget friendly”
• Creating a functions.php file to register the sidebar
• Enclose your static sidebar in the dynamic sidebar conditional tag
• Making multiple widget-ready areas
• Other creative ways to use widgets

Start widgetizing your themes and read on…

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A conditional tag can make the browsing experience for your visitors a little different depending on which page they are browsing. I use conditional tags extensively on this website. How do you think I get the list of all previous tutorials I’ve written listed on only the tutorial pages? How is it the recent post listings display on the sidebar on every page, except the homepage? This is all through conditional tags. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• What exactly a conditional tag is
• A list of the WP conditional tags and what their functions are
• How to put a conditional tag to use while avoiding errors
• Real examples of conditional tags used in WordPress themes

To learn everything you need to know about conditional tags and how it relates to WordPress themes, read on…

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