Themes Archives

Sometimes we have to dive deep into some scary code to make a theme or plugin do what we want. Here are some articles that deal with such things.

Keep in mind that software evolves fast and a tweak that worked a year ago may not work anymore today.

How to use the TwentyThirteen Theme by Automattic

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In this screencast I’ll show you how to use TwentyThirteen, a simple yet powerful WordPress theme that looks gorgeous and is mobile friendly. I’ll explain Post Formats and their impact, how to show images in galleries and how to embed videos to your WordPress site too. I’ll finish it off by demonstrating how the site … Read more

How to style block quotes in P2

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I’ve just snazzed up the blockquotes styling on a couple of my P2 sites and thought I’d share the code that did it. Here’s an example of the final result in P2: This is a block quote. You can create one by adding blockquote tags to the beginning and end of a block of text … Read more

How to replace fonts in TwentyThirteen

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I must admit that the new default font in TwentyFourteen looks damn sexy – but I’ve only just gotten used to the TwentyThirteen theme. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re after a magazine style theme then TwentyFourteen does a great job. Since I didn’t want to change themes again over at versluis.com, I thought perhaps … Read more

How to use your own random header images in TwentyThirteen

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I really wanted to use the new WordPress TwentyThirteen theme over on my other site http://www.versluis.com. But I didn’t like the idea of using the default header images.

Since my previous theme had random header images, I thought it would be great to tap into the now built-in function and prepare a child theme that overrides those existing header images with my own. Here’s how I did it:

  • first we’ll create a child theme
  • then we’ll remove the existing header images
  • and add our own images

As a final touch I’ve tweaked the site title font and gave it a Photoshop-like outer glow, all in CSS. Let me talk you through it step by step.

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How to add drop down categories to Automattic’s P2 Theme

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You know I love P2. I always have, and I always will. It’s the perfect theme that turns my WordPress installation into a notebook site.

Many users – me included – have often wished for the addition of categories to P2, so that when you write a post, you can add it to the category from the front page, perhaps via a convenient drop down menu.

Here’s how to do it with P2 Version 1.5.1.

And if you don’t want to hack the code yourself, I’ve got a full working project on GitHub that’s ready to rock.

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How to style the Add Media button in P2

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I’ve noticed that the Add Media button in P2 version 1.4.2 is a bit too low when you write a Blog Post. The button usually sits neatly above the status box, however it cuts into the top of the box due to the additional text field for the blog post – like so: It’s not … Read more

How to bring back Post Categories in P2

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We’re all excited about the new features in Automattic’s P2 Theme v1.4.0 – however many of us have setup custom tweaks around Post Categories. In the latest version these have been replaced with Post Formats.

Post Formats are great, but they are limited to values defined in the WordPress core. If you wanted to create a new post menu like “critical” or “alarm” this wouldn’t work. We could use Custom Post Types to add to those formats, however it’s way too big an operation for I wanted to achieve: which is bringing back the “posting into categories” feature we’ve come to love from the previous version.

In this article I’ll show you how to back-port categories so posts will appear as they did in P2 v1.3.3 while retaining all functions of the latest update.

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