Have you ever found that the WordPress theme you are using offers a ton of Widgets to use? This can create a real pain in the tail end when you are trying to add or remove widgets from select sidebar widget areas. Consider the following: As you can see, there are a number of Widget Areas here, and on many displays, several of these can appear below the fold. Add a few widgets to each section and it really gets crazy… and very hard to manage. Now, with a little help from jQuery, we can change this to be an easier to use interface. See the same page, but with the new jQuery: Now, you have a...

When working with themes, sometimes you want users that are less than an Administrator to be able to update theme options. By default, if the user can not “manage_options” (which all Admins can), the user will not be able to update the options. Instead they are greeted with a “Cheatin’ Uh?” page. To avoid the error, you need to grant the user the correct permissions to do this. Side Note: WordPress developers… can we change this error page please? When you hand a site to a client powered by WordPress and they get a page error that says they are Cheating, its not the...

A lot is being made of the mobile web, and for good reason. Depending on where you get the information, mobile web use could well outpace traditional (desktop) web use very soon. It is certainly an area of rapid growth in website development. With such rapid growth, there are a number of issues that developers must overcome. With the mobile web being still relatively “new”, developers are still trying to figure out the best ways to account for getting the content to the user in the best way. With a more compact viewing area (in most cases), the lack of a mouse due to touch input, and a...

The debate has long raged… Should a Web Designer understand Web Programming? In other words, should the web designer be able to code the website they design? Maybe this is another entry into that long debate, maybe not. But I wanted to weigh in a bit on this. First, let me clarify the side in which I am coming from. You see, I do both web develop and web design. I find pleasure in both, from different vantage points. But for the sake of this article, I am simply a web programmer, providing a small note to the website designers out there. Is it important that you be able to code? From where I sit,...

WordPress theme developers… How clean is your code? Did you know that you can find out very easily? Simply enable the following line within your wp-config.php file, and you will see if your code is clean! [code]define('WP_DEBUG', true);[/code] This will display WordPress warnings and notices. I recently did this and found a few issues on my main Framework I use for development. Not that there were a lot of issues, mind you, but here were a couple of the notices my theme had: Notice of Deprecated WordPress function: This notice / warning lets you know that one or more of the functions you are...