Hear us on Your Website Engineer Episode 24!
Randy and I were call-in guests on a popular WordPress podcast that aired May 18, 2011. Listen to us discuss WordPress with Dustin Hartzler of Your Website Engineer on episode 24.
Your Website Engineer has served many thousands of downloads to the WordPress community and ranks within the top 10 when one searches for the term “WordPress” within the Apple iTunes Store. This episode marks Dustin’s 24th podcast on how to build your own quality website and runs for just under 30 minutes.
Our discussion relates to our recent blog post “Why WordPress?“. We discuss what a Content Management System (CMS) is, and why somebody would want to choose WordPress over other freely available open-source CMS platforms such as Drupal, Joomla!, and CMS Made Simple.
Introducing Benchmark Email Lite
We just released version 1.0 of Benchmark Email Lite to the WordPress community via the WordPress.org Plugins repository. Benchmark Email Lite creates a newsletter signup form widget.
The widget creates a simple W3C and WAVE validated signup form to instantly subscribe visitors to a Benchmark Email contact list, requesting the subscriber’s first name, last name, and email address. If the subscriber preexists on the list, this will update the subscriber’s first and last names on the mailing list.
Theme and Plugin Differences
Randy and I had a fun discussion the other day about the programmatic differences between themes and plugins. For the most part, anything you can program within a theme can be programed into plugins, and anything you can program into plugins can be programmed in a theme. So how do you decide which to use for a particular purpose? The answer is simple—PLUGINS!
As we tweaked our site’s theme, Boldy, we had to decide on whether to strip functionality that we didn’t need out of the theme, replace functionality with other plugins, or move functionality into new plugins for eventual release to the WordPress Plugin Directory for community benefit. For example, the “Share” button on the bottom of blog posts (below). The design of the button was part of the original theme. We moved that functionality over to a plugin, which could potentially be replaced with something such as ShareThis or AddThis. We decided to make this a plugin, because it represents functionality more so than page design, and could be useful to other sites—not just ours. We did the same thing with the contact form that was part of the original theme.
Other examples of functionality built into the theme we found were (1) Smooth Navigational Menu, (2) prettyPhoto lightbox, (3) Twitter integration, (4) Cufon font smothing, (5) Nivo Slider, and (6) custom search box. All of these features should ideally be built into plugins, not kept within the theme. We might get to moving those someday!
Tweaking Boldy
Our recent site relaunch was based upon a free Premium WordPress theme, Boldy by Site5. Leading up to our new site release and since that time we’ve released significant updates to this theme. There have been so many rather bold adjustments that we decided we would let the world know what exactly the process of tweaking an existing theme entails. We’re also planning future posts on the related topics of performance, security and interoperability.
Here’s what all we did to make “beBoldy”…
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