Tag: wordpress-theme

Fix StanleyWP WordPress Theme Portfolio Grid

Fix display of portfolio grid rows

Back in September of 2014 I wrote about using the StanleyWP WordPress theme for a portfolio site. After I added some projects, I noticed the grid on the Portfolio page template wasn’t displaying rows correctly. I even noted it in my original post, towards the end.

I’ve had a few people contact me about how to fix the StanleyWP portfolio grid issue, and earlier today Arun left a comment asking how to fix the grid issue.

You need to be using a child theme for this, it’s just good practice. If you don’t know how to create a child theme, read my post on creating a child theme. It’s really easy to do, but may require you to reset your menu or some widgets after changing to the child theme.

Anyway, Arun confirmed that this gist fixed the problem for him.

Just save that code as template-portfolio.php and put it in your child theme directory. Your portfolio should now show three projects per row. No CSS or anything else needs to be modified, just that one page template.

Let me know if you have any issues or questions.

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My Portfolio

I finally have one!

I’ve known for a long time that I need some type of portfolio, especially since I’m doing freelance web development full-time now.

A potential client wanted to see my portfolio. I explained that I didn’t have one for various reasons, and instead described to him some of the more interesting projects I’ve done.

After the long email describing previous projects, I decided to create an online portfolio. I had recently bought the domain longrendev.io, but wasn’t using it for anything. So, I found a nice Twitter Bootstrap based portfolio WordPress theme and got to work. The theme needed some tweaking, the grid displaying the projects was a bit messed up and needed fixed, which was very easy.

The theme I chose was StanleyWP, a simple, minimalistic portfolio theme. The best thing about it was it’s price, free.

It’s built with Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.3, which is a little old, but still gets the job done. The current version of Twitter Bootstrap is 3.2.0.

Once I get some client projects finished up, I’ll probably take some time to update StanleyWP to use Twitter Bootstrap 3.2.0, or whatever the newest version is at that point in time.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. There’s a LOT of projects I still need to add, so the list of projects right now is fairly minimal. I am also going to be using that site to take project requests.

If you need a portfolio site and would like to use StanleyWP, let me know if you need help fixing up the grid issues. It’s very simple to do, but may not be so simple for someone who isn’t a developer, like a designer. :)

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Meet Unyson, A Drag & Drop WordPress Framework

Features a visual drag & drop page builder that will let your users create countless pages at a drop of a dime

Got an email from Olga at ThemeFuse yesterday announcing the release of their new drag & drop WordPress framework named Unyson.

Unyson comes with many built-in extensions, and the documentation seems to be very helpful and complete. Some highlights from the Unyson home page:

  • All the built in extensions & options work in perfect harmony. You’ll find developing on Unyson a breeze.
  • Your users will love the drag and drop page builder and the customization options built into
  • All you need to do is download the Unyson WordPress framework and start developing your theme.
  • We have a lot of tools ready to help you along the way: developer manual, Trello, GitHub Support and more.

unyson-docs
Unyson also includes an extensive list of customizations and options:

  • Page Builder
  • Option Types
  • Styling
  • Sidebars
  • Megamenu
  • Backup
  • Sliders
  • SEO
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Portfolio
  • Custom Widgets

I enjoy this theme so much because it has many features that premium or paid themes have, but Unyson is free! You can download the source on GitHub.

Getting started with Unyson is extremely easy, but slightly different than how you’d typically upload a theme. Installation of Unyson is like so:

  1. Download the framework archive from the framework’s GitHub repository
  2. Extract it to your parent theme directory. After this you must have framework/ directory in parent theme. It’s mandatory to have this exact same folder structure otherwise it will not work.
  3. Include the Unyson framework by adding this line in your theme’s functions.php:

require_once TEMPLATEPATH .’/framework/bootstrap.php’;

After that, you’ll need to add some more code to the beginning of all the PHP files associated with your theme. I suggest you go over the Getting Started guide and really pay attention so you get a good understanding of what Unyson can do. The documentation is really awesome, most issues or questions you could have are more than likely covered in the docs.

I haven’t had much of a chance to play with Unyson, but will get the opportunity to on an upcoming client project, so I’m really looking forward to that.

Unyson is quite new, so hopefully we will see more features as it matures. It’s definitely worth checking out.

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Building a WordPress Child Theme

Make changes to your theme the correct way

Whenever I’m using a pre-built theme and need to make changes to it, I create a child theme and then make all changes to that child theme.

A child theme inherits features from it’s parent theme. This allows you to make modifications to the child theme without affecting the code in the parent theme, which allows the parent theme to be updated as normal, without causing your modifications to be lost.

Benefits of using a child theme

  • If you modify an existing theme and it is updated, your changes will be lost. With a child theme, you can update the parent theme (which might be important for security or functionality) and still keep your changes.
  • It can speed up development time.
  • It’s a great way to get started if you are just learning WordPress theme development.

Creating the Child Theme

Only one file is required when building a WordPress child theme, style.css. The only required lines in style.css are Theme Name and Template. I typically use something like the following for my style.css file. Just set the Template value to whatever the name of your parent theme is. In my case, it’s independent-publisher.

Theme Name: longren.io
Theme URI: http://longren.io/
Author: Tyler Longren
Author URI: http://longren.io
Template: independent-publisher
Description: Independent Publisher is beautiful reader-focused WordPress theme, for you. Clean, responsive, and mobile-ready, it gets out of your way and lets you share what you create. Full support for all Post Formats. This theme is ideal for both single-author and multi-author blogs.
Version: 1.0
License: GNU GPLv3
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Example Child Theme GitHub Repository

I put together a simple child theme example, it’s available on GitHub.

Feel free to use it as a base for your child themes. It’s setup to include the parent theme CSS, child theme CSS, and the Font Awesome CSS. If you need help, you can ask in the comments at this post, or create an issue at the GitHub repository.

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How-To: Add Minimal-UI Viewport Meta Tag to WordPress

Introduced with iOS 7.1

I don’t have an iPhone, but my daughter does have an iPad Mini, which is running the latest iOS, 7.1. However, this only works for those of you on iPhone’s, so I see no difference.

Martin Wolf was kind enough to let me use the image from his post about this subject so that I could more easily illustrate the difference. So, even if you don’t have an iPhone, you can still see the changes this makes in the featured image above.

With the release of iOS 7.1 (and possibly late 7.0.x builds), Safari introduced support for a new value in the viewport meta tag. To me, it sounds like it adds effects similar to how Chrome hides its top bar when a page is loaded, but more. For example, the navigation buttons at the bottom are hidden.

I rarely use Safari, like never. Chrome is available on iOS, so that’s what I’ve always used. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t support Safari to it’s fullest, because I’d wager that a majority of iOS users stick with the default, which is Safari.

Chances are, your theme already has a viewport meta tag defined in it’s header.php file. If it does, add minimal-ui to it, so it should look something like this: 

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, minimal-ui" />

If your theme doesn’t already have a viewport meta tag set, you can add one with your functionality plugin or theme’s functions.php file like so: 

<?php
function set_viewport() {
?>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimal-ui">
<?php
}
add_action('wp_head', 'set_viewport');
?>

Adding the code above will add a brand new viewport meta tag for you, so only use that if your theme isn’t already using a viewport meta tag in it’s header.php file.

That’s it!

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