Traffic has increased greatly since the launch of Elemental, The Local and Accumulo in the last 6 months, so Pro Theme has decided to bring extra help to the forums to make your support experience better and more reliable.

Give a warm welcome to Dustin Ward and James Morrison, 2 talented consultants who make their living off WordPress and have done extensive work with theming. They will continue getting acquainted with the particularities of Pro Theme products while Ben and I will continue to oversee things and concentrate on future plans.

Ultimately we could only afford 2 moderators who met all the criteria, but we were pleased and impressed by the volume of applications we received and want to thank everyone who showed interest!

Business at Pro Theme continues to grow! And this means more questions to answer in the forums. Ben and I would like to spend more time on development so we’re looking to hire a forum moderator to help out, for an hour or so each day, Monday-Friday.

What are the requirements? You must be talented and experienced at using CSS, PHP and general WordPress theming. You must also be familiar with the workings of all Pro Theme products, which you will receive for free including upgrades. Priority #1 in the forums is solving potential bugs, and Priority #2 is helping with customization.

Sounds interesting? Drop us an email for more details about pay and support policies.

WPVote

The site is a Digg style community voting site built on the WordPress platform. Not dissimilar in function to software such as Pligg or Drigg (notice a pattern in the naming of these things?) it focuses on the WordPress community and promoting peoples content.

There is a full run down of the WPVote development on my personal site, Binary Moon.

WPVote.com was originally developed by Jean Baptiste Jeung, and he sold it to me late last year so that I could continue the development of it. As well as giving back to the community (by promoting peoples content) my hope is that I can eventually release the theme as a premium theme here on Pro Theme Design.

It’s not a conventional WordPress theme for blogging, but it does come with its own custom Blog page template (live example). The problem is that some users wanted to merge the blog with the homepage feeds so that it wasn’t obscured.

Blog option for the homepage

So what Ben did was to add an option that lets you assign which tab will display the blog on the homepage:

New homepage blog option

In the same Options panel, you can then name that tab whatever you want (ex: “Blog”):

Assign a tab to your blog

As you can see on the live homepage, you can now display the blog in whatever tab you choose:

Optional blog tab on the homepage

Caching

By nature Accumulo is intended for aggregating outside content which means there must be some restrictions on caching or else the page-load would get very slow as it struggled to collect all those feeds. To give the user more flexibility, Ben added some caching options that can be adjusted depending on your preference:

New caching options

Noteworthy changes:

• Widget area descriptions, per WordPress 2.9
• Google Analytics code changed to Asynchronous method
• New header-image upload method. Reduces reliance on problem-causing legacy code. Note: if you use the old header image method, it will be reset and you’ll need to re-upload the image. This is a one time deal, and won’t be required again. Apologies for any problems it may cause
• New favicon upload method
• New admin panel branding abilities. You can now add your own header image and footer text. Perfect for designing sites for clients, or for websites that require public accounts logins
• Calendar added to Archives page to enable easier traversal of historical content
• TimThumb updates to latest version which featured stack of bug fixes and improvements
• Improved custom post options which allow for filtering via plugins or child themes
• Fixed Google maps widget (they changed the API which broke the widget positioning – doh!)
• Major improvements and code clean-up added to Sitemap page template
• New page numbers layout for paged content
• Option to hide the home link
• Subtle improvements to caching system
• TimThumb shortcode (more) can now dynamically resize images in posts. Example: [thumb width="" height=""]http://image/path[/thumb]
• New option for “Post Details”s widget so author details can be displayed on pages OR posts OR pages and posts – it’s your website so your choice
• Improved admin bar for logged-in users which includes gravatar and link to user account. Allows for good integration for community sites (such as the upcoming WPVote.com redesign)

In general if you’re looking for information about updates, you can log into your accounts panel and view changelog records there. We are also working to sync up the custom Elemental dashboard widget with the Pro Theme blog. Stay tuned.

It takes just 5 lines of code, placed in your functions.php file, to change your homepage order.

function bm_alterCategoryOrder($settings) {
$settings['category'] = array(1,2,3);
return $settings;
}
add_filter('bm_categorySummaryDetails','bm_alterCategoryOrder');

All you have to do to set the different category orders is swap the 1,2,3 above for a comma separated list of category ids.

Accumulo Live Demo »

Who is it For?

You may be a blogger who likes to write but also need a site that collects niche content from all over the web. Accumulo lets you publish it, excerpt it, categorize it and rearrange it using a custom control panel screen.

Accumulo Theme Options Screen

On the front end, Accumulo provides a clean and easily-customized layout enhanced with smooth, elegant jQuery animations in the tabs, dropdown menus and ‘back to top’ button. Set up Accumulo as as a personal content ‘hub’ and monetize it with ease.

What Can it Do?

The infrastructure of Accumulo mixes Gravy’s clean markup with the premium features and widgets of Elemental. Additional features include:

• Custom page template for Blog and Archives
• Animated multi-level dropdown menus
• Custom control panel options to control tab names and ordering
• Custom widgets for Twitter Updates, Popular Posts, Facebook and more.
• Front-end admin bar for adding or editing posts
• Smooth tab and scroll-to-top animations
• Image thumbnail resizing
• Support for gravatars, author comment highlighting, threaded comments and paged comments
• Full localization and translation support
• Widgetized sidebar and footer

Partners in Health

PIH focuses on providing medical care to the poor in developing countries. They need donations to continue their community-based care model which has helped many countries, especially Haiti, since 1987. They also provide free education programs and improvements to sanitation, clean water and economic opportunities in the communities they serve.

Doctors Without Borders

DWB is an impartial humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in 1971 to serve countries suffering under war, epidemic, disaster and overall lack of healthcare access. DWB is already on the ground in Haiti but lacks sufficient “medical staff, equipment and medicine to properly care for the injured.”

Related Links:

• Boston.com Big Picture: Earthquake in Haiti
• The Help that Haiti Needs
• Text Messages Speed Donations to Haiti
• Haiti Live Blog Updates

All this functionality is great so long as you, the developer, implement it in a way that is tough to break. Because once in the hands of the client, anything goes.

Then there is the issue of layout. For clients, moving content from one column to the other can be a technical hurdle, particularly for dynamic sites which rearrange content frequently to satisfy advertisers, audience demands, and so on. Default drag-and-drop widgets are a great part of our arsenal, but adding custom widgets can really make life simpler for both developer and client.

Example Custom Widgets

In the quest to give more control to end users, Pro Theme has been experimenting with more custom widgets. Check out the demo for themes like The Local and Elemental for examples.

Below are widgets we’ve started including with most themes, including Mimbo Pro:

• Google Adsense. In the control panel you enter your Adsense ID and the widgets display ads accordingly. Works in any of the standard block sizes.
• Community Tweets. Aggregates Twitter activity according to location latitude/longitude. Contains fields for Number of Tweets and Mile Radius.
• Latest Tweets. Contains fields for Username and Number of Tweets
• Post Author Details. Contains author avatar, date and comments feed.
• Upcoming Posts. Displays a list of future-dated posts.
• More from this Author. For single-post pages. Displays five headlines from the same author.
• More from this Category. For single-post pages. Displays five headlines from the same category.
• Print Preview. Uses javascript to render the page print-friendly and free of images.
• Share This. Lets you post the current page to Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Facebook.
• YouTube. Displays a featured video with fields for Embed Code and Description
• Map Your Location. A Google Maps widget with fields for Location, Zoom Amount and Type of Map View (Roadmap, Satellite or Terrain).
• Popular Posts. Displays five headlines of most-commented posts.
• Subscribe to Feed. Includes an RSS icon and feed link.

In the case of The Local, the entire homepage is 90% widgetized, with four columns to configure. We’ve gotten tons of great feedback from users who rely on positioning Google Adsense blocks and want to adjust their content accordingly. Not to mention writers in the hyperlocal space who write unique content, but also rely on aggregating from other sites and social media sources.

How Do Custom Widgets Work

At the simplest possible level, custom widgets are implemented by 1) creating a class, and 2) registering a new widget. Forget about functionality within the widget for a moment and look at the basic setup which you would paste inside functions.php:

class My_Widget extends WP_Widget {
	function My_Widget() {
		parent::WP_Widget(false, 'Our Test Widget');
	}

	function form($instance) {
		// outputs the options form on admin
	}

	function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
		// processes widget options to be saved
		return $new_instance;
	}

	function widget($args, $instance) {
		// outputs the content of the widget
	}

}
register_widget('My_Widget');

That’s it. We can now visit our widgets panel to confirm:

Adding editable functionality into our widget is another story. Using the “Popular Posts” widget as an example, my partner Ben Gillbanks will walk us through creating the rest.

Creating a “Popular Posts” Widget

Firstly we have to name the widget class. I prefix my functions and classes with bm_ (Binary Moon) as it means there will never be any clashes with other functions and plugins. We can then name the widget in the constructor, which is the first function, and it should have the same name as the class. This will be called when the class is first created and it defines the name you see in the widget editor.

Next up, I create the last method which is a form function which defines what data can be editable within the widget. In this case, it’s simply the title of the widget to be displayed on the blog. The update method can often remain as it is, although you may want to do some data validation (make sure the data input is safe/ allowed).

Then finally, the widget method. This is where the widget itself is displayed. You’ll notice I am actually passing the arguments to another function that is elsewhere in the theme. The reason I do this is because I like to split the display out separately so that I can use the function directly in the theme without widgets as well.

Notice the $args parameter in the widget method. These args are actually the arguments you pass to the register sidebar method, before_widget, after_widget etc. You can read more about these and creating custom widgets on the WordPress Codex Widget API page.

Here is the final code:

<?php
class bm_widget_popularPosts extends WP_Widget {

	function bm_widget_popularPosts() {
		parent::WP_Widget(false, 'Popular Posts');
	}

	function widget($args, $instance) {
		$args['title'] = $instance['title'];
		bm_popularPosts($args);
	}

	function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
		return $new_instance;
	}

	function form($instance) {
		$title = esc_attr($instance['title']);
?>
		<p><label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>"><?php _e('Title:'); ?> <input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo $title; ?>" /></label></p>
<?php
	}

}

function bm_popularPosts($args = array(), $displayComments = TRUE, $interval = '') {

	global $wpdb;

	$postCount = 5;

	$request = 'SELECT *
		FROM ' . $wpdb->posts . '
		WHERE ';

	if ($interval != '') {
		$request .= 'post_date>DATE_SUB(NOW(), ' . $interval . ') ';
	}

	$request .= 'post_status="publish"
			AND comment_count > 0
		ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0, ' . $postCount;

	$posts = $wpdb->get_results($request);

	if (count($posts) >= 1) {

		if (!isset($args['title']) {
			$args['title'] = 'Popular Posts';
		}

		foreach ($posts as $post) {
			wp_cache_add($post->ID, $post, 'posts');
			$popularPosts[] = array(
				'title' => stripslashes($post->post_title),
				'url' => get_permalink($post->ID),
				'comment_count' => $post->comment_count,
			);
		}

		echo $args['before_widget'] . $args['before_title'] . $args['title'] . $args['after_title'];
?>

		<ol>
<?php
		foreach ($popularPosts as $post) {
?>
			<li>
				<a href="<?php echo $post['url'];?>"><?php echo $post['title']; ?></a>
<?php
			if ($displayComments) {
?>
			(<?php echo $post['comment_count'] . ' ' . __('comments', BM_THEMENAME); ?>)
<?php
			}
?>
			</li>
<?php
		}
?>
		</ol>

<?php
		echo $args['after_widget'];
	}
}
?>

Further Uses for Custom Widgets?

Clients frequently need special notifications and other dynamic bits to display on their site with minimal fuss. What other content that’s frequently handled via plugins would make a great custom widget?

If you open up footer.php in Elemental you will see that there is no reference to Pro Theme Design, however we’re not trying to hide the links, what we’re trying to do is make the theme as flexible as possible, and so you can easily edit the links using a child theme and a simple filter in your child themes functions.php file (more info on child themes here).

Swap the credit link for a “Powered by WordPress link”


function changeFooterLinks($footerLinks) {
$footerLinks[1] = 'Powered by <a href="http://wordpress.org">WordPress';
return $footerLinks;
}
add_filter('bm_footerContent', 'changeFooterLinks');


Remove the credit entirely


function changeFooterLinks($footerLinks) {
unset($footerLinks[1]);
return $footerLinks;
}
add_filter('bm_footerContent', 'changeFooterLinks');