Darren Hoyt Dot Com | Development

March 2008

Fri 7^th

Mimbo News & Customizations, Part IV

First things first — with Wordpress 2.5 due out on Monday, we’d like to give the community, and ourselves, at least a couple days to install/adjust before launching Mimbo Pro. Otherwise things are going great and we’re finishing up the last of hosting and commerce issues….
Sat 1^st

Additional features and custom controls for Mimbo Pro

It’s been a very productive week with very little sleep, but things are progressing nicely with Mimbo Pro. Ultimately, our goal is to create a CMS-like theme that requires no manual template editing. To achieve that so far, we’ve added to a growing list of features which are handled through a custom control panel tab. During testing this weekend, we had a few more in-the-moment brainstorms…

Wed 27^th

How does your blog display RSS info?

Back in the relative old days of 2003-2004 when orange RSS icons started appearing in the sidebars of websites, very few users knew what to do with them. Jeff Veen said said…
Sat 23^rd

Development of Mimbo Pro is Wrapping Up

Barring any major snags, the Mimbo Pro theme will be released in less than two weeks. It will be sold exclusively through a new WP theme marketplace run by a blogger/friend who also contributed some fancy programming to Mimbo Pro’s control panel options. Here are some features to look forward to…
Tue 12^th

Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress

Here is a common navigational scheme, with parent pages on top and child pages (if they exist) on bottom…
Sat 2^nd

Combining Featured Posts with the Standard Loop

I recently had a client who requested his blog display posts similar to GigaOm.com — one featured excerpt, three featured headlines, followed by the standard Loop and pagination…

Tue 29^th

Publishing External RSS Headlines to Your WordPress Site

I wouldn’t advise republishing content from any old RSS feed, but sometimes there’s a reason…
Sun 27^th

Easy Date-Based Image Mastheads

Around Christmas, I had a client ask for masthead imagery that would automatically swap in/out based on the time of year. Here is the HTML/PHP I used…

Wed 26^th

Multiple WordPress Page Layouts in One Single Template

Our client wants a medium-sized site he can edit using Wordpress as a CMS. Some sections in the navigation will have subpages, while some will not. We’re going to need a conditional that checks for subpages, and if they exist, uses a two-column layout…
Thu 6^th

Customizing Your WYSIWYG Editor Buttons in WordPress

WPCandy.com gave a nice tutorial this week on how to add and edit the behaviors of WYSIWYG buttons in Wordpress. This inspired me to make three additional hacks of my own…

Tue 27^th

Mimbo 2.2 is Available for Download

The new version is out — meanwhile read about what’s new…
Tue 13^th

Premium WordPress Themes and Other Concerns

Matt Mullenweg announced two weeks ago that Wordpress would go forward with a Themes Marketplace where designers could sell their work and split the profits 50/50 with Automattic. But earlier this year, some designers had already begun selling “premium themes” themselves — WP templates with bonus features, plugins and otherwise above-average designs. Solostream was among the first to offer this kind of paid-theme product.
Mon 12^th

Another Update to Mimbo 2.1

If you are having problems displaying your author picture, it’s because the image-path is incorrect. In single.php, this line…
Sat 3^rd

Mimbo 2.1 is Available for Download

It’s with a near-crippling hangover (too many VaFilm festivities last night) that I announce the release of Mimbo v2.1. If youâ€™re already familiar with v2.0, you will enjoy the new features…

Thu 18^th

Mimbo 2.0 is Available for Download

Read more and grab the files here! If you’re already familiar with v1.1, you will enjoy the new features.
Sun 14^th

Mimbo 2.0 is in Development

If you’re not familiar with the Mimbo magazine theme for Wordpress, get the details here, but please note that the demo site for Mimbo 1.0 is down due to database issues. But there’s good news – this weekend I began building out Mimbo 2.0 which can be viewed here, still in progress»

Mon 10^th

Managing WordPress Template Tags with Dreamweaver Snippets

For designers who don’t write PHP from scratch, the Wordpress template code mentioned in past articles can be cumbersome to type out for each new project. For me, that code is a perfect candidate for Dreamweaver’s ‘Snippets’ tool which allows the code to be saved, managed and re-used with relative ease.

Fri 24^th

Build A Dynamic Design Portfolio with WordPress

Any content pulled from Wordpress qualifies as “dynamic” by definition, but there are varying degrees of how to break down and print that data. As seen in other articles, I’m a fan of exploiting Wordpress’s query_posts function for purposes other than blogging.