Andrew Rickmann Spotlight Special

Andrew Rickmann, a regular here at the Tavern, spent the month of January concentrating on the subject of themes. I submitted a couple of ideas to him and he came through but he also published quite a bit of good information on topics that I think require some more discussion. So without further adieu, I dedicate this entire post to Andrew!

Monday Poll: Premium Theme Features – Andrew highlights many of the factors that may go into calling a theme ‘premium‘. He then asks what is it that a theme has to have to make it premium? Ironically enough, we also have a an ongoing forum thread on this same topic which you can view here.

How to add sidebars to a theme – This is one of the articles I requested that Andrew highlight during the month. Sometimes, we get a theme that fits our needs but we wouldn’t mind having another sidebar to put widgets into. This articles gives you the 411 on how to do just that.

Post image the easy peasy way – In this article, Andrew highlights how to take an image from a post and place it in a thumbnail form on a news/magazine type layout or for a prettier look to your archive pages. He even provides the code you can add to your functions.php file.

Premium themes are translatable themes – How many people use themes who do not post in English? In this piece, Andrew explains how to translate a theme so that it can be used by those who speak or read in a language other than English. An important topic considering WordPress is used internationally.

How modular should a theme be? – Instead of providing a summary, I’ll provide a teaser for you as this is a pretty interesting question:

I don’t know how much of your theme code you want to share with others, or how much you want to take from others, but next time you are creating some relatively complex code to format something in your theme consider how necessary it is to connect that code directly to WordPress, and if you can, separate it, and share it.

That, after all, is the idea behind open source and community development, isn’t it?

Can you do without widgets? – Will themes continue on the never ending road of providing ultimate flexibility and removing structure, or will someone stop this merry-go-round with the intention of providing more?

That wraps it up for my Andrew Rickmann spotlight special. If you do not have Andrew’s Fun With WordPress blog in your RSS feedreader, I highly advise you to head on over there and add it right now!