On the upcoming theme I’m working on I needed to have a featured section on the left side, and normal posts on the right. Usually I would put the featured posts in a category, and excluded that from the normal posts. But for the end user, it is much easier to just tag the posts they want to be featured with “featured”. That way they don’t have to create a category called featured, select that in the options panel etc.
It isn’t so well documented, so after talking to Adii we came up with the following code that does the job perfectly for the right hand side normal posts:
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get_var("SELECT term_ID FROM $wpdb->terms WHERE name=’featured’");
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$paged = (get_query_var(‘paged’)) ? get_query_var(‘paged’) : 1;
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‘tag__not_in’ =>
array($tag),
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‘paged’=>$paged,
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);
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query_posts($args);
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?>
The left side query is simple and just looks like this
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<?php query_posts(‘tag=featured’); ?>
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I haven’t been designing anything new lately, since I’ve been put on the task of coding some of the themes from our WooContest held back in ‘08.
Irresistible
The first theme I finished coding on (basic coding done by PSDtoWP) was Irresistible, which we release as a free theme on WooThemes. It was designed by Izzudin Helmi who also designed the whole Groovy Series which I’ve now been put in charge of.
Groovy Video
First up was Groovy Video which I coded from scratch to lay the foundation for the other two themes in the series. After I designed and coded WooTube, I sorta got the hang of how to do a video theme, so this was naturally my first pick to code.
Next themes I will be working on will be Groovy Photo and Groovy Mag(azine), and hopefully the base work I’ve done with Groovy Video will make development time much faster for these new ones.
A long, long time ago, when html was html, tables were the sh*t, and hover effect on links was the hottest thing out there, I made a website. Specifically it was my first “real” project, where I would actually receive some sort of compensation, and it was for my local golf club where I actively play, Stavanger Golf Club.
The new design of Stavanger Golfklubb
It’s not a secret that Fresh News is the most popular theme on WooThemes, and that it has been customized far beyond what I ever intended the theme to be when i first designed it. One of the best customizations of this theme came from GoMediaZine, who are experts in graphic design.
On friday evening, I had a little time to myself, so instead of doing the normal stuff (tv, movies or misbehaving in town), I decided to start up Photoshop. I know that sounds incredibly geeky, and I won’t deny that it is… but I enjoyed the heck out of it 
A couple of beers later and I had a new theme designed for WooThemes, and we’re planning on releasing it sometime in December. Let me know what you think!
I thought I’d write a little post about how I actually managed to sit down in front of my new 24″ monitor, boot up Photoshop and design my site in a little over 24 hours. And by 24 hours, I don’t mean 24 hours of straight working, cause that would just be silly to work that long. The effective work hours is probably about half of that, since I had to eat, sleep and get my daily fix of The Office US in as well So how did I go about designing and coding a fully fledged WordPress theme in that short amount of time? Simple.
I cheated.
Yep that’s right… I consider it cheating, because I didn’t code my site from scratch, but instead used Over Easy, my latest contribution to the ever growing WooThemes theme collection. I finished making Over Easy a few weeks ago, and I liked the simple layout I had created in that theme. The only big difference between my new website and Over Easy is the front page, which took me the longest to code. But as you can see from the blog page, the layout is pretty similar, although I have changed the sidebar and the list styling.
This should be good proof of the usability of a standard WooThemes theme, and as you can see from our showcase, there are quite a large number of web designers doing the same as me; cutting corners. So is this kind of “cheating” a bad thing, or is this becoming the norm for designers wanting to save production time and increase profit from their clients? Let me know what you think by posting a comment!
