Themes Archives

By default, the TwentyThirteen theme suppresses the date byline when a post is marked as Sticky (in which case, it’ll always be displayed at the top of the posts list).

That’s usually great, because Sticky Posts are often timeless announcements, and the fact that they’re a year or two out of date doesn’t look as handsome as if the date byline would simply be removed. I like this as a default behaviour.

Here’s what a default sticky post looks like, without the date displayed:

But of course, every now and again you may want to break the rules and shake up the whole universe. I did this on my iOS Dev Diary recently, where an announcement post would have been very helpful with the date displayed (I didn’t intent to keep it there for long).

So how do we bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen? Let’s find out!

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I could have sworn that when I started using Automattic’s TwentyThirteen theme over five years ago, it displayed an Author Byline in the meta description. That’s the text right underneath the title of a post, the same line that displays the post date, categories and tags.

I remember this because there were many an instance on which I had to hide that Author Byline, because on single author websites, crediting yourself over and over again just leads to a cluttered reading experience. Furthermore, if you have several tags and categories to display, the meta line can easily run over into a second line, adding to more clutter than we want to see.

Turns out that over time, the WordPress team have had a lot of feedback about the Author Byline, and it turns out that nine times out of ten, people just didn’t want to see it. So they decided to invisibilise it by default.

Thanks to David Greene and P. Chandra for bringing this to my attention.

Let’s take a look at two options that can bring it back in TwentyThirteen.

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I’ve recently changed themes on this site, from my own development of P2 Categories to Automattic’s TwentyThirteen. P2 Categories was not mobile friendly by default, and TwentyThirteen gives all my major notebook sites a cohesive look, making maintenance easier for me.

One thing I’ve noticed about TwentyThirteen is a small bug that’s been discussed several times around the web: when no header text elements are shown (under Appearance – Customise – Site Identity), a graphical header image disappears on mobile devices. Or more accurately, when the screen width changes to anything below 767 pixels.

If a site title and description are shown, the bug does not present itself, and instead the theme resizes the header image as well as the text without issues. That’s the behaviour I’m experiencing on both my 3D Dev Diary and my iOS Dev Diary.

I did some digging and found a suitable solution for this problem. Let me share it with you here.

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The marvellous P2 Theme has an interesting feature: write out a plain link, and it magically becomes clickable without explicitly adding the a href tag.

This may not be a big deal if you’re writing posts in the visual WordPress editor rather than HTML, but for those of us who like to write in HTML, it’s just one less thing to worry about.

I was investigating this feature recently, and it turns out WordPress has a built-in function that can do this: they call it make_clickable(), and it works with URIs, FTP, Email addresses and anything starting with www. The function is really easy to use too: it only takes one parameter (a string), and returns the clickable HTML code.

$clickableText = make_clickable($plainText);

Let’s see how to use it in context, using the TwentyThirteen theme.

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