Lately, I’ve been using Thematic–a framework for building WordPress themes faster.

Thematic gives you a solid, bare-bones theme with reset CSS styles, a very basic layout, no color and limited typography. A clean slate.

Don’t Touch That Theme!

To create your theme, you don’t actually edit any of Thematic’s theme files. Instead, you make changes using a separate child theme.

It’s really powerful since you’re not actually touching any part of Thematic. You just get a nice starting place, without worries about future Thematic updates overwriting your code edits.

You don’t have to rewrite a bunch of code all over again–you’re just adding the bits that you want to be different. This works very much like the custom styles on WordPress.com hosted blogs.

I’ve collected together 40+ Thematic resources, tutorials and links to help you get up and running faster.

Thematic and WordPress Child Theme Basics

• Official Thematic Website
• WordPress Child Theme Basics
• Modular CSS
• Theme Template Directory Structure

Theme Hooks

• Thematic 0.9.6.1 Is Live (Updated 2/10/2010)
  Details about newest version. Contains new hooks and filters for even more control.
• Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes
• Theme Hooks
• Adding Custom WordPress Hooks
• Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes
• Theme Filters
• Frameworks, Child Themes, Filters and Hooks?
• Overriding Parent Theme Functions in Child Themes

Thematic Tutorials

• 10 Design Tips For Your Custom WordPress Theme Built With Thematic
• Edit Your Theme With Functions.php
  Tons of fun by adding functions to edit your theme.
• How I Used a Custom Page Template to Redesign My Blog the Smart Way
  Step-by-step creating a new child theme.
• Replacing WordPress Content With an Excerpt in a Thematic Child Theme
  How to replace the_content() with the_excerpt()–without touching your theme files.
• Add “Featured Posts” to Your Thematic Child Theme
• Use WordPress as a CMS With Thematic: Part 1
• Add a Header Image to Thematic the Easy Way
• Add a Search Box to the Thematic Menu
• Adding Theme Options to WordPress Themes
  Creating theme option pages to your WordPress theme.
• ThemeShaper Forums
  If you get stuck, the Thematic Forums is the place to go for help.

Editing Parts of Your Theme With Thematic

There is a whole series of tutorials on the Thematic website for edit particular parts of your WordPress theme:

• Thematic 0.9.6.1 Is Live (Updated 2/10/2010)
  Details about newest Thematic version. Contains new hooks and filters for even more control.
• WordPress Themes Template Tutorial Series
• Working With the Index Template
• Editing Your Thematic CSS
• Editing the Header Template
• Editing the Sidebar Template
• Editing the Single Post, Post Attachment and 404 Templates

Thematic Cheat Sheets

• Thematic Structure Cheat Sheet
  A visual look at all of Thematic’s main elements–div’s, theme actions, hooks and widget areas. Very, very useful.
• Widget-Ready Areas
  Images of widget-ready areas for each major template and section of Thematic.

Thematic Child Themes

There are already some nicely-designed Thematic child themes.

Acamas

SimpleCart (js) – E-commerce theme

Audry

Gallery

Aether

Sugar Cane

Update: 3HoursTheme (by Matteo Stagi. Also includes tutorials to help you to use the theme)

Cosmos Labs

I can’t include Thematic themes without mentioning Cosmos Labs. They have released several nice child themes. Here are a few.

Byty

Street

Early Morning

Commune

Crystalline

Element Templates

These are not full child themes, but themes for specific parts of a WordPress site that can be used along with another child theme.

• Login and User Registration Page Templates For Thematic
• Replacing the Thematic Menu With a DropDown List of Categories

Hopefully these links will give you a good place to start using Thematic.

What Do You Use?

Do you use Thematic? Do you use some other WordPress framework? Tell us in the comments.

The only problem I have is that it’s only viewable to registered WordPress users with an admin role. Editors, Authors and Contributors can access the WordPress backend, but can’t view the stats.

You could always install a bloated role manager plugin just so you can allow others to view CyStats. But this is overkill unless you need to adjust roles for some other reason.

Here’s a quick way to allow non-admin users to view your CyStats stats:

1. In WordPress, go to Plugins > Editor
2. Select CyStats from the upper right dropdown list
3. Choose cystats/includes/admin.php from the list of plugin files on the right.
   Alternatively, FTP to the wp-content/plugins/cystats/includes/ dir and edit the admin.php file.
4. Notice there are several ‘8’s (or possibly ‘9’s or ‘10’s). These are the numbers for the WordPress user levels/roles. 8-10 are admins, 7-5 are editors, etc.:

   /**
    * Builds admin panem menu for Plugin
    */
   if(!function_exists('cystats_create_admin_menu')){
   	function cystats_create_admin_menu() {
   		if (function_exists('add_options_page')) {
   			add_options_page('CyStats Options Page', 'CyStats ', 8, 'cystats-options', 'cystats_admin_options');
   		}
   		if (function_exists('add_menu_page')) {
   			add_menu_page('CyStats Statistics Plugin', 'CyStats', 8, __FILE__, 'cystats_admin_index');
   		}
   		if (function_exists('add_submenu_page')) {
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Index','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Index','cystats')), 8, __FILE__, 'cystats_admin_index');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Blog','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Blog','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-blog', 'cystats_admin_blog');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Clients','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Clients','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-clients', 'cystats_admin_clients');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Referer','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Referer','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-referer', 'cystats_admin_referer');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Robots & Tools','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Robots/Tools','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-robots', 'cystats_admin_robots');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Pages','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Pages','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-pages', 'cystats_admin_pages');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Time','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Time','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-time', 'cystats_admin_time');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Options','cystats')),htmlspecialchars(__('Options','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-options', 'cystats_admin_options');
   		}
   	}
   }

5. If you want editors (as well as admins) to be able to view the stats, change the 8, 9 or 10 throughout the includes/admin.php file to the number of the user level your want (ie 7, 6 or 5 for editors).
6. If you only want the admin to be able to edit the CyStats options/settings (recommended), don’t change the final 8 (or 9 or 10). It looks like this:

   add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Options','cystats')),htmlspecialchars(__('Options','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-options', 'cystats_admin_options');

That’s it! No editing the database.

Note: You’ll probably need to make these changes again when you update the CyStats plugin, so this isn’t a perfect solution, but the CyStats plugin isn’t updated too often.

Enjoy.

Remember the mottoes you learned when you were a kid: “Winners don’t do drugs”, and “Cheaters never win”?

Well, a little cheating never hurt anyone… when it comes to using cheat sheets, that is.

TechPosters has a colossal collection of cheat sheets for just about every program, coding language or OS that uses code or keyboard shortcuts.

Since there’s such a huge list of cheat sheets, let’s look at some of the useful cheat sheets for web designers.

HTML

• HTML 5 Quick Reference Guide
• HTML 5 Cheat Sheet
• XHTML Cheat Sheet v 1.03
• XHTML 1.1 and HTML 4.01 Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
• HTML Help Sheet (HTML 4 and XHTML)
• Form Tags
• Character Entity References in XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4
• HTML – Special Entity Codes
• HTML Common Tags

Note: If you’re looking for more resources for UTF-8 special entities, check out my earlier post, Most Used XHTML Character Entities.

CSS

• CSS3 Quick Reference Guide
• Core CSS Part 1 (by Molly E Holzschlag and published by DZone), Part 2, and Part 3
• CSS Properties
• CSS2 Cascading Style Sheets
• CSS Shorthand Guide
• CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet by Example
• CSS Property Index
• CSS Cheat Sheet v2
• CSS2 Quick Reference Guide
• RGB Colour Codes

jQuery

• jQuery Selectors (DZone)
• jTouch – jQuery Cheat Sheets For iPods and iPhones
• jQuery 1.2 Cheat Sheet 2
• jQuery 1.2

There are a ton of other cheat sheets for javascript in general, as well as other frameworks like EXT JS, Prototype and an entire category for Mootools.

These can be found in the general Javascript Cheat Sheet category.

PHP

• PHP Cheat Sheet (DZone)
• Symfony PHP5 Framework – Admin Generator Cheat Sheet

Plus Many, Many More

There are also tons of other web design cheat sheets for MySQL, ASP.NET, Flash, Silverlight, XML and more.

Another nice thing about the TechPosters site is that you can subscribe to RSS feeds for each category and know when new cheat sheets are added.

Share

Do you use any great cheat sheets for web design that are not included here? Where do you get your cheat sheets from?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2355395 bytes) in /public_html/wp-includes/http.php on line xxx

If you look at the file mentioned in the error message, you won’t find anything worthy of changing. I believe the line number mentioned is simply the line where WordPress ran out of memory.

Fortunately, I found the answer in a thread on the WordPress Forums (which should be one of the 1st places you go when looking for WP-related answers).

The error is memory related, so increase your available memory (after backing your site up, of course). Edit your wp-config.php file and add the following line right after the opening php statement:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Save the file and try the upgrade again. Unless you have something else wrong with your site/WP setup, the upgrade should now work perfectly.

The solution I (finally) found involves sorting the posts in the Events category based on the value of a certain custom field.

Before finding the solution though, I tried several different ways to get events to show up, ordered from newest to oldest., but nothing I came across worked completely.

Skip ahead to the solution…

What Didn’t Work

In order to save some people who are looking into doing something similar, I’ll tell you what didn’t work for me. Some of the things mentioned here might work for your project, but it didn’t work for me.

WordPress Plugins

I started out trying not to reinvent the wheel and just go with a WordPress plugin. However, I couldn’t find anything that fully met my needs.

Calendar Plugins

I tried using several calendar and event plugins to get the job done. These might work for you, but I needed to have each event have its own post page. This was because each event had a registration form for the individual events.

Most of the WordPress plugins I found, either didn’t allow linking to actual posts—they only showed a summary. Many of them used a non-WordPress system to store the details about the event. Some just didn’t work at all and gave errors.

Event Plugins

I had similar issues with WordPress event plugins as I did with the calendar plugins. They had their own system of storing events (not as posts) and many of them where too rigid as far as options.

Future Post Plugins

I also tried using a future post plugin to make it appear that posts that were scheduled for a future date (say the date of the event) were actually published.

All the plugins I found apply this to all posts in all categories with no way to control it. So if you ever scheduled any post in any category to publish later, it would be published immediately—not just your future events.

Other WordPress code

In the meantime, I tried different code offered on sites to help with this and some would work partially, while others would not.

One “solution” was to schedule the post to be published on the date of the event and then use some PHP/WordPress code to show all the posts tagged as future posts in a certain category.

I was excited about this and it looked like it was exactly what I wanted.

The flaw with this plan is that while it will show the future scheduled posts and they will be all in the correct chronological order on a page pulling in posts, you can’t actually view individual post unless you’re logged in as administrator. People not logged in will get a 404 File Not Found message when trying to view the full post. This is just the way WordPress is designed and I couldn’t find any workaround for this.

The Solution, Already

I know, a lot of build up for the solution. Well, here it is.

Part 1: Flutter Plugin and Custom Fields

I was already using a great plugin called Flutter, which lets you create custom write panels and work with custom fields and all in a much more user-friendly way.

I created an Events write panel in Flutter and made an event_date custom field. I used this to display the date of each event instead of the published date of the post on my main Events page.

Flutter’s documentation is pretty sparse, and I could not get the sort by custom field to work using the code examples on their site, so…

Part 2: Order Using a Custom Function

Since the custom fields made by Flutter are just regular WordPress custom fields, we don’t have to use Flutter’s code to order them.

I found a great post and bit of code on Think Press‘ site:

Order Posts by Custom Key Revisited

Take a look at the above bit of PHP code and make these adjustments:

1. Wrap the code provided in PHP tags (see comments if you’re unsure how to do this)
2. Copy and paste that code into your functions.php file in your WordPress theme.
3. Adjust the if statement to match your page or category to your needs
4. Change to the custom field you want  to sort by on this line (change ‘Price’ to your custom field):

   $where.= "AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_key = 'Price' ";

This worked like a charm. All the events are ordered from newest to oldest—based on the event date, not the publish date. This also works on any custom field; not just those used in Flutter.

Recap

Here’s a recap of my basic process:

• Created an Events category in WordPress
• Used Flutter to set up custom fields for the event date, time, etc
• Set a custom single post template for posts in the Events category (to show event registration code)
• Set up my Events page to pull in those posts
• Added the code found at Think Press‘ site to my theme’s functions.php file
• Replaced the post publish date with the custom field for the event’s date in my templates

Some of the above steps may not apply to your project, but hopefully this will save you some time when needing to sort by custom field in WordPress and when working with creating events.

In the previous 2 weeks, we’ve looked at how to use CSS shorthand to reduce the size of your stylesheets, and how to speed up the development of HTML pages.

In this week’s quick and dirty set of tips, we’re going to look briefly at optimizing PHP code.

Increasing Site Performance In PHP

Unlike optimizing your CSS code, usually your main goal in optimizing PHP code is not to cut down on file size, but rather speed up the loading and performance of your pages.

Knowing the most efficient ways to get what you want accomplished in PHP can give your pages a boost as far as processing and loading speed.

Here are 3 tips to help you optimize your PHP code and make your pages load faster:

1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
2. echo is faster than print.
3. Use echo’s multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.

Source: Reinhold Weber

Read all 40 PHP optimization tips

Is It Worth Optimizing My Code?

If you follow the above optimizations, just how much will these speed up your site?

When optimizing any type of code, it’s important to keep in mind that the time spent optimizing your code may be better spent if it’s only going to improve performance slightly.

Some of the tips listed above may not improve performance or speed enough to be worth the time invested in optimizing you PHP.

Devolio has a great post (with graphs and charts and statistics) showing which PHP optimization tips work, and how much impact these have on loading and performance speed.

Practical (and Impractical) PHP Optimizations

As with optimizing in general, moderation is important. I don’t believe all the 40 optimization tips should be used, but there are several that can greatly improve your pages performance.

More Quick and Dirty Tips

• CSS Shorthand Tips
• Lightning Fast Page Setup
• Optimizing PHP Code (For Fun and Profit)

Subscribe to our RSS feed and look for new installments of Quick and Dirty Tips.

PhpMyAdmin is a great program for managing MySQL databases and is included in most web hosting control panels. But what turning a client loose in there? Scary.

Does the thought of letting a client manage their database through phpMyAdmin make you tremble in fear?

If you need to let a client edit their own databases—add and remove records, there are a lot—A LOT—of things that can be messed up. Do you have to steady yourself on the furniture at just the thought?

I’m right there with you. There are way too many options available for mucking up a database using phpMyAdmin. Not only that, but you don’t want your clients passing out or going into an anxiety attack when they see phpMyAdmin for the first time.

Simple Database Management With Vty

Without having to build a custom admin system or anything like that, you can allow your clients to add and edit data in their databases with Vty.

What exactly is Vty?

• Web-based MySQL database management script written in PHP
• Lets you view and edit your database tables
• It’s only 1 file—yes, just one 30KB file needs to be uploaded to the server
• It’s free under a GPL license
• Supports multiple languages (English, Turkish, Italian, Spanish)

While, Vty (currently version 1.6) still gives a little more power to your client than needed in most cases, with an acceptable amount of effort, you can trim out the bits you don’t need/want.

Try It Yourself

As LeVar Burton always said, “But you don’t have to take my word for it”.

• Vty Screenshots
• Try the Vty Demo

Customizing Vty

Since Vty is just a PHP script, you can edit and change the bits you need to customize the experience. Here’s just a taste of what’s possible with a bit of extra work (from one of my recent projects).

Simplified entry page with client’s name and branding

Editing a record inline / text links replaced with icons

In the above screenshots, I replaced some of the text links with icons from the Silk icon set. I also changed some of the wording to be more logical for my client and project (ex: changed ‘Insert a New Record’ to ‘Add a New Member’).

The tricky part of customizing Vty is that the classes, IDs and functions are written in Turkish. That’s fine if you speak Turkish, but less helpful if you don’t. Fortunately, most everything’s in a function and there’s some helpful comments in English in the code, so you can use this to suss out everything. Search and replace will be a big help.

MS SQL Anyone?

There’s also a script that works with MS SQL that you could try: MS SQL Simple Manager (toward the bottom of the page). I haven’t tried this, but it’d be worth a shot checking out.

Database Management Made Easy

Vty is a great free tool for giving your clients and simple and safe way of managing information in their databases. I’m certainly glad I found it and hopefully this will be helpful

Is anybody already using Vty in some of their projects? I’d love to hear about how you’re making use of this script.