From now on, you must have an offline WordPress installation running, if you don’t know how to do it, check this link out.

Within your offline WordPress, go to …\Xampplite\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\themes and, inside “themes” folder, create a new folder, named “our_theme”.

Open the file you saved at the end of second lesson and save it as index.php, then move it into “our_theme” folder .

Different WordPress themes are recognized by WordPress engine through style.css and index.php, we already have our index, so let’s create our style.css file.

Copy the code below and paste it on a text editor, then save it as style.css, in the same folder you placed index.php; from now on everything we create will go in there, …\Xampplite\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\themes, just to refresh your memory.
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21 05 2009 | Wordpress Themes | 2 Comments

Now that we have our foundation ready, is time to add the code that will make everything work.

This is the easy part, since we have all we need in the Default WordPress theme, also known as “Kubrick”.

Since you must have a working WordPress installation, log into your dashboard, go to appearance > editor and select “Wordpress Default” at the right top theme selector dropdown. This will not active the theme, don’t worry.

Click on “main index” and copy everything down from <?php if (have_posts()) : ?> to <?php endif; ?>.

To make things easier, the code goes bellow, but, since WordPress is regularly updated, don’t trust it too much. The best thing to do is always get the code from the latest version, that you must have in your installation to begin with (if you don’t, update it right now).
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20 03 2009 | Wordpress Themes | Leave a comment

Introduction

You don’t have to be a top notch coder to create a solid, SEO friendly, web accessible, cross-browser WordPress Theme.

Most people think they have to know everything about php and stuff in order to create a theme. It doesn’t hurt if you do, but that’s far from the truth.

You don’t have to create every line of code from scratch. In fact, you don’t really need to create any line, there’s a lot of code out there just waiting to be used.

The first thing you have to do is to define how will your theme look like. Define if you want 2 or 3 columns, where will the main content appear etc.

This is a good time to see what you want to keep on your blog and what you may want to get rid of. As time goes by, we tend to aggregate a lot of clutter on sidebars. Check everything and keep only the important ones.
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05 03 2009 | Wordpress Themes | 1 Comment

Animal Planet, Discovery Channel?

No, the scene you’re about to see took place in a southern Brazilian city with 2 million people called Porto Alegre, in a downtown park.

The animal, as a matter of fact, is a tortoise and not a turtle, but who can actually see the difference?

The man who appears on the video is Clóvis Bujes, an animal biology PHD. He explains that tortoises are predators, but this kind of attack is very unusual.

“There are too many tortoises in a small place, and the quest for food leads them to attack the pigeons. People should do nothing about it, since this is the way things go in nature”.

Ronaldo Bernardi, who works for Zero Hora, a popular newspaper, shot the whole scene and he tells it took months:

“I went to the park on a daily basis for six months, after people told me that this kind of thing happened quite often. Today (January 21), I was lucky”.

23 01 2009 | Holy Crap | 1 Comment

WordPress generates a lot of duplicate content and that’s not good from a SEO perspective. Archives, paged pages, date base pages, tag pages, and some other stuff I probably won’t remember now, all listing the very same content over and over.

The ideal scenario is when your blog has only the home page and single posts indexed by search engines in general and Google in particular, since Google owns most of this market.

Accomplishing that may be difficult, but is definitely not impossible.

So, what must be done to have a killer robots.txt file?

1. Log in to your Google Webmasters Tools account.
2. Go to Tools > Generate robots.txt.
3. In step 1, select “Allow all robots”.
4. In step 2, select “block”, “all robots”, and paste the items you’re going to copy bellow:

   /feed/
   /page/
   /tags/
   /trackback/
   /2007/
   /2008/
   /2009/
   /2010/
   /*.css$
   /*.cgi$
   /cgi-bin/
   /*.xhtml$
   /*.php$
   /*.wmv$
   /*.js$
   /wp-admin/
   /wp-includes/
   /*.gz$
   /*.inc$

The files above are responsible for most of your duplicate content.

Tags, depending on the number you have, may generate hundreds of pages with the same content. Feeds are dupes of you content, it makes no sense to get them indexed either.

Those years mean that date based archives will not be indexed, you may add or remove whatever years you want, based on how long your blog is live and how ahead you want to think.

The other files are internal ones, there are no reason to get them indexed.

That’s it, hit on “Add”, copy the result, paste on a .txt file, save it as “robots.txt” and upload it to your blog root.

Don’t worry with the warnings that’ll appear on your Google Webmasters Tool, that’s normal and will disappear after some time.

22 01 2009 | WordPress How To | Leave a comment

A couple of days ago I was managing to move a blog from one domain to another. It’s not the first time I do that, but still hadn’t found the best way to do it.

After some research, I think I found the best, fail proof way to accomplish it.

To be honest, there are two best ways to do it:

Moving To Domain Root (Home)

If you are moving your blog from olddomain.com to newdomain.com, the best thing you can do is parking the new domain over the old one. If your host supports cpanel, it’s a no-brainer to make the changes.
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10 12 2008 | WordPress How To | 5 Comments

Before anything, I would like to thank everybody who’s using my themes. I was checking the stats and the 2000 downloads barrier has been broken.

And now, into the freebie.

Fluid Blogging is a very light weight theme, with less than 36KB. It uses almost no images and is fully optimized to make your blog fly like the wind.
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23 10 2008 | Wordpress Themes | 6 Comments