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

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 content¹ 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 family².

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.

In the mean time, a briefly tweaked³ version of 281 has been pressed into service. I really like the minimalist and clean design.

A few small updates to the core design here, a little prod there.. and it should do the job nicely.

After having far too many buttons, dials and sirens I really want to move back to basics — where content is the primary focus, with minimal, yet pleasant eye-candy acting as a background. It’s all to easy to lay on the Ajax, MooFX, images, etc and end up with sizeable bloat. :)

1. .. particularly topic sensitive sidebar related data. (↩)
2. .. specifically, is_page() detection flaws.. although there are others. (↩)
3. .. more ‘tweak’ to come. (↩)

There are times where the standard wordpress loop, is a simple, effective and well documented solution to generated a page, or a series of posts. It safely hides all the mySQL query language away in reusable, modular PHP expressions and can be called at the drop of a hat, as needed.

However, it’s downfall is that it’s based on grabbing n amount of posts based on the options set — which then requires expressions run against the results to further prune out unwanted data, such as excluding a post based on a category, or date. This, then, creates a scenario whereby there is a sizeable performance hit as the wordpress db is hit with, for example, a request for 10 entries, of which some may be thrown out during the_post() loop.

A recent addition to my ipod podcast list has been the wordpress podcast, which is a great way to keep tabs on news and events surrounding wordpress development and the community in general.

In the latest episode - Episode 8: Dealing with splogs, posting by e-mail and more a goodly number of plugins are covered, including sig2feed and a little coverage of the joy that is splogging.

After the amazing demand whipped by by
sig2feed, I’m pleased to announce it’s gone beta!
Code named ’snarf’ — sig2feed has had some small sections of code cleaned up, the admin panel is a little less, well, ugly and a new feature has been bedded down.
If you wish to add your custom sig2feed block on a […]

It never ceases to amaze me how much of an impact it can heave have, releasing a
wordpress related
theme or
plugin.
The move to
(mt) Media Temple from
dreamhost has been the single best hosting move bar none. I cannot emphasise strongly enough just the staggering difference of having a rock solid hosting service means […]

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 […]

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.

After purging a bunch of spam comments I’ve upped the ante in the war on terror spam.
It really doesn’t matter how many spam plugins I use, or whatever extraordinary efforts I go to, spam always seems to find a way through the defenses. A combination of black-list, keyword filter, Akismet and Spam Karma 2 […]

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! :)

The scenario:
You want to exclude a category from being processed by a post loop, with posts in said category having more than one category1, keep wordpress db calls to a minimum2, no dropping of data after you’ve already hit the db3 and finally provide a set limit of posts.
The quest:
After a quick grep of
the […]

Whatever have you done to the wordpress.org
search, Mr
Matt ‘wordpress’ Mullenweg? It’s so very badly broken.
Once upon a time, in place not so far away, one could spend quite the merry sunny afternoon or cool winters evening searching
the codex for all manner of code goodies.. but not today.
Oh how I long for […]