Its been awhile since I threw up a new blog post. Been working hard and trying to finish up some grad-school applications. However I have been in the midst of creating a new Wordpress theme and have discovered that a really great functions.php file can be an enormous help for the template designer AND for whoever may need to edit your template later. If you are considering creating a template that you will eventually distribute or if you know that someone besides you will eventually have to modify the template you should definitely put a lot of thought into your functions.php file. In this post...

I have been using YAML for awhile and decided I’d like to write a post about it. YAML is an acronym for YAML Ain’t Markup Language and it is a very useful and concise serialization standard. I use YAML all the time in when I am coding PHP projects that require some kind of configuration files. Here is what wiki says about it: YAML syntax was designed to be easily mapped to data types common to most high-level languages: list, hash, and scalar. Its familiar indented outline and lean appearance makes it especially suited for tasks where humans are likely to view or edit data structures,...

Recently I had a problem where I needed to find out if a specific category was a descendant of another category, or if one category was a ancestor of another. The latest website I am working on has a top level category called “Trips we do” and below that are many sub-categories and sub-sub categories etc. I wanted to use the same template on all of the categories that were descended from the “Trips we do”. Wordpress already has a function that returns the parent categories get_category_parents but this returns a string more suited for breadcrumbs. I needed a yes or no answer...

The time has come for me to finally publish a post about my recent foray into Wordpress plugin development. I am by no means an expert on the subject and maybe that is why this guide can be helpful for the newbie. Prior to this I have done extensive plugin and development work on Joomla! so I figured it shouldn’t be to hard to do something for Wordpress. I have been working with WP websites for only about a year or so and have grown to love the platform. I had written my cSprites core API and was looking for a platform to implement a plugin for and decided it would be a good chance to learn...

I have been working a lot lately on customizing my personal homepage theme. One thing I have not been happy about has been the right sidebar. The widget heading were just html text and didn’t have the rendered look that I wanted. I decided to reformat the sidebar and use images for the headings rather than just text. I had done some custom sidebars before but I wasn’t sure how to style each widget independently. The problem is that WP gives a generic class to each sidebar widget and you are only able to style all of them to look the same. The first place I looked for a function to do...