smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

The ‘foo has just been upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, with nary an issue in sight¹. Well done Matt and the team, the upgrade was surprisingly bump free and the new features² are very well received.

Granted — Whilst I still cannot bring myself to use the WYSIWYG editor, the rest of the improvements look particularly solid.

An additional upside is that sig2feed appears³ to be quite operational under 2.1, so it should be ready for you on the ‘other side’ of the upgrade — another win for the day!

1. .. yes, I was going to hold off, but all credit to the WP team - 2.1 upgrade was flawless (↩)
2. .. such as auto-save (↩)
3. provisionally, at least (↩)

In the words of Kosh Naranek “..and so it begins”:

“On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 ‘Ella’, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.” ~ via Development Blog

There are simply too many “new and improved” features to mention, however I would strongly advise that a quick check of plugin compatibility should be the first order of business, followed by a complete backup of everything^tm before any upgrade is attempted.

After a short hiatus — the orange powered ninja is back and is just as badass ((.. or is that just plain bad? :) )) as ever.

If you recall, I had been experiencing some issues with the wordpress function is_page() — in that it wouldn’t always return a valid value ((.. due in part to my craptastic coding skills and playing fast and loose with functions)) in the sidebar. After trying, once again to crack the is_page() puzzle, I was struck by a simpler, faster and stupefyingly simple alternative. You ready for it?

I’ve been battling with the previous theme, this_is for a few weeks now.

Due to a few design flaws it’s proving a challenge to get some of the content ((.. particularly topic sensitive sidebar related data.)) to display correctly. This comes down to a combination of limitations in the template structure I used and a small number of foibles in the 2.0.x wordpress family ((.. specifically, is_page() detection flaws.. although there are others.)).

I’m also more fond of the ’split’ layout option — that is, where the sidebar has migrated to the ‘bottom’ of pages.

Having cut my teeth converting a basic XHTML template into a wordpress theme, it’s time to up the anti and look at developing ‘the look’ from scratch.

Having ‘missed the boat’ so to speak in regards to the
pink for october campaign to support breast cancer awareness I’ve felt not the least bit guilty that I couldn’t re-design in time to join
the chorus of voices in support.
However, two events have happened to coincide that allow me to make up for lost […]

Smithers.. release the hounds!
My experience post creation and releasing a
certain theme goes a little something like this:

broadleaf is released.. time passes..
broadleaf is poked and prodded by quite a few folks.. time passes..
a bunch of issues are discovered and fixed.. time passes.
I read Lorelle’s
reminder on the joys of
oversized element content.. time pas.. oh […]

After a few months of
broadleaf released unharmed and unhindered in the wild, it’s amazing to see what folks have done with it. At last count the theme has had in excess of 3800 downloads between this site and the
broadleaf themes.wordpress.net entry.
With the knowledge that broadleaf has had some time out in the community, […]

Having run with the default graphics in
my take on the
lovingly green foliage for some time, I felt it was about time to stamp it with something more indicative of smackfoo.

Broad leaf has gone release candidate
• masses of fixes and shiny new loop code that handles asides, or ’sides-less configuration.. get it while it’s hot! :)

broad leaf has been updated
• I have cleared some code from footer.php that should not have been in the live release1 - version has thus been bumped to 1.3b1 as a result.
Make that version 1.3b2 - some more features have been added - refer data.php for the changes. :)
note: you only need to overwrite footer.php […]

If you’ve had a wander around smackfoo earlier today, or spotted my mischievous comments elsewhere, you may have been noticed my
gravatar has changed. I have now officially begun work on my first fully self-coded design. The image to the left is a hint of the new logo I am working on, along with some […]