What are the requirements with Child themes? Well… Honestly there isn’t a whole lot. The only 3 things that are required:

1. The child theme folder must be named a certain way
2. You need to include at least one file in that folder namely style.css
3. You need to make the header of the style.css mention that it’s a child theme

I am going to assume that the theme folder has been kept the same. ie.  ( .\wp-content\themes\blank )

You will need to create a new folder called (.\wp-content\themes\blank-child ). Inside this folder you will need to place a file called style.css. To make things easy as possible just copy the style.css from the parent theme BLANK.

Here’s what the style.css theme looks like from the download (Click image to enlarge it):

Here’s what the style.css file will look like in the child theme (Click image to enlarge it):

Notice I need to change the theme name in the child style.css. I also need to tell it to use “Blank” template. I do this on line 7 of the child blank theme.

Now that I am done making those changes let’s do something REALLY crazy and change the menu color from black to red.  Search for “#horz-dropdown-menu” and change the css color to “red” like so (Click image to enlarge it):

Now activate the child them from the theme section in WordPress.

Everything is identical EXCEPT that the menu is now red. As you can see this can be VERY powerful. You can change the way a template looks without worrying about loosing functionality.

Please note! – The child theme style.css COMPLETELY overwrites the parent style.css

Ok. Let’s try another example of how you can use Child themes to extend the original theme. This time we are going to make a slight change the included google analytics code. This is one example that will most likely want to do right off the hop if you are making a child theme. Right now it’s very easy to predict how the google analytics code will look. But say in the future I update the code and you apply the update to your server. Essentially it would over write the current functions.php file and your manual configurations with it. As you can probably imaging that this would not be a good outcome. So how do we deal with this?

I ripped this next section off the WordPress website:

• Unlike style.css, the functions.php of a child theme does not override its counterpart from the parent. Instead, it is loaded in addition to the parent’s functions.php. (Specifically, it is loaded right before the parent’s file.)
• In that way, the functions.php of a child theme provides a smart, trouble-free method of modifying the functionality of a parent theme. Say that you want to add a PHP function to your theme. The fastest way would be to open its functions.php file and put the function there. But that’s not smart: The next time your theme is updated, your function will disappear. But there is an alternative way which is the smart way: you can create a child theme, add a functions.php file in it, and add your function to that file. The function will do the exact same job from there too, with the advantage that it will not be affected by future updates of the parent theme.
• The structure of functions.php is simple: An opening PHP tag at the top, a closing PHP tag at the bottom, and, between them, your bits of PHP. In it you can put as many or as few functions as you wish. The example below shows an elementary functions.php file that does one simple thing: Adds a favicon link to the head element of HTML pages.

Here’s an example of a the child theme functions.php file. When put into the child theme folder all parent functions can still be accessed but add_googleanalytics will now be over written with whatever you decide to change or add in this file. (Click image to enlarge it)

I want to thank Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks fame. I started off using his Blank WordPress theme for the initial fork of the code. You can use this theme for personal or business use. This theme can be edited/Changed/forked to your liking. The only thing that I’d ask of you is:

• If you like or use this theme let a few other people know about it.
• Before you change or fork the Theme I’d ask if you’d let me know if there was a feature that is missing that you would like included so that everyone can benefit from it.

If you are needing a great Winnipeg WordPress developer you might want to check out my business website Winnipeg Experts.

Tutorials on how to use my Blank WordPress Theme

• How to use Child themes with my Blank Theme - 3/5/2012

Updates

• 3/6/2012 – Fix child theme Google Analytics bug and started including child theme example.
• 3/5/2012 – Cleaned up footer and moved google Analytics into a function
• 2/27/2012 – Added some extra features to the theme. On this post I am now going to list all the features of the theme and what version the features came in.
• 2/19/2012 – My Blank WordPress Theme was born.

Key features of my Blank WordPress Theme

• CSS Reset – 1.0.0
• HTML5 markup – 1.0.0
• jQuery included automatically – 1.0.0
• Easily target page via browser type using modrnizer – 1.0.0
• Added background and image selecting support in WordPress – 1.0.0
• Thumbnail (featured image)support added to theme – 1.0.0
• Added image sizes – 1.0.0
• Easily build a dropdown menu using one function – 1.0.1
• Easily select how the page is going to look (Sidebar left or right) using drop down – 1.0.1
• Example of Custom Taxonomy (disabled by default) – 1.0.1
• 2 Page Templates created – 1.0.1
• Registered two menus – Header & Footer – 1.0.1
• Google Analytics is now part of function.php instead of footer - 1.0.2
• Child Theme now included – 1.0.3

Custom Functions of the theme

• Build a dropdown menu using one function – jh_horz_dropdown_menu($menu_name); – 1.0.1
• Easily display the featured image on the page by calling one function – jh_display_featured_image($image_size_name); – 1.0.1

Features Planned

• Change custom menu function to allow for building horizontal or vertical fly-out menus using the same function. Function name will be generalized once the code work has been completed.
• Slider/Image rotator
• Get Theme Hosted on WordPress.com so updates can be applied automatically. Easier to install. ie. No FTP access needed.

Latest Version:

• Version 1.0.3 – Download Blank WordPress Theme 1.0.3

Older versions:

• Version 1.0.2 – Download Blank WordPress Theme 1.0.2
• Version 1.0.1 – Download Blank WordPress Theme 1.0.1
• Version 1.0.0 – Download Blank WordPress Theme 1.0.0

Background

I was getting this error when I first installed the plugin. I then moved the .htaccess file in the proper location and everything seemed to be working. I then enabled WordPress Networks (Formally called Multisite).  I started getting that error again from WP-DBManager about being being visible to the public.

Solution

It turns out that in order to remove the error message happens because wordpress uses virtual directories. Because the .htaccess file isn’t in the virtual directory it put’s up the error. To get around this you need to disable WP-DBManager for the network. Once disabled go to the main WordPress site and enable the plugin there. Do NOT enable the plugin on sub-networks. Voila! You’re done.

Removing the related videos isn’t all that hard to do. You can only remove the related videos on videos that are embedded  in other webpages. You need to add “&rel=0” to the “src” link.

After making the adjustments here’s what it looks like.

Overview – The backup will use WP-DBManager to backup the sql first. I will then use my computer to sync the website to my local PC.

Things needed – You will need a Windows PC, Cobain Backup and WP-DBManager.

First log into your WordPress install. You will need to go to the plugins and install “WP-DBmanager”. You will also need to setup the backup. It’s pretty easy to do. If you are installing it on GoDaddy servers make sure to check out my other post – http://jaredheinrichs.com/how-setup-wp-dbmanager-with-godaddy-mysqldump-and-mysql.html

Once done make a backup of the sql database.

Install Cobain Backup on your locally on your PC. Make sure to setup a Task where the source is an FTP site and the destination is your local machine.

Sync the task You local folder will now not only have everything on the Webserver it will also have the DB Backup. Hope this helps

To get things working you will need to enter this info:

If you don’t have this info entered you will see red errors all over the place and the backup will not work properly.

Hope this helps anyone trying to setup WP-DBManager on GoDaddy!

You can most likely tell that  WordPress’s bloginfo() function will return some information regarding your blog. I’ve listed all of the command you can feed bloginfo() below.

name                 = Testpilot
description          = Just another WordPress blog
admin_email          = admin@example

url                  = http://example/home
wpurl                = http://example/home/wp

stylesheet_directory = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/child-theme
stylesheet_url       = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/child-theme/style.css
template_directory   = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/parent-theme
template_url         = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/parent-theme

atom_url             = http://example/home/feed/atom
rss2_url             = http://example/home/feed
rss_url              = http://example/home/feed/rss
pingback_url         = http://example/home/wp/xmlrpc.php
rdf_url              = http://example/home/feed/rdf

comments_atom_url    = http://example/home/comments/feed/atom
comments_rss2_url    = http://example/home/comments/feed

charset              = UTF-8
html_type            = text/html
language             = en-US
text_direction       = ltr
version              = 3.1

I’m guessing since you are here you are wondering how can you use bloginfo() in your theme and why should you care?

The thing I tend to use bloginfo() for is making sure that no matter where on the site, things like my CSS file location, my home page and theme files are always calculated properly. One of the things I see most often with new WordPress users is that they use relative paths to files like CSS and images. While this might work in static sites, it doesn’t really work all that well in dynamically creates site like a WordPress Website.

Here’s an example:

Notice how I highlighted that the url has several sub folders – “/category/operating-system/active-directory-2003”. If your theme would have used relative paths for the logo and the encompassing link you would have noticed that the logo wouldn’t show up and then link would be most likely broken.

What I normally see people do to fix this issue is just put in Fully Qualified Paths for things like the logo and certain links. In my opinion not only does this add extra bloat to the website it also kind of defeats the dynamic nature of WordPress! Because I tend to create offline themes first and then move it to a online Webserver. If you didn’t use bloginfo() for the links you will have to do a bunch of extra manual changes where ever you hard coded things. This causes extra headaches and unneeded work.

Using my website as an example you can see I use bloginfo() to fill in the anchor link “Url”very easily. I’ve also told it display the Logo image that is located in the template directory.

Another thing I have seen is a person is wanting to make a slightly modified theme for say Christmas. If you were to copy the theme, rename the folder and activate then new theme,  all your hard coded links would no longer work or still point to the old theme location!

I recommend getting into a habit of making your themes with built in WordPress functions like bloginfo(). It will save you time and fustration. You will also know that you can pickup your theme and move it where ever you want and you don’t have to worry that the theme folder is even named the same.

Here’s a listing of ALL the settings you can use with “bloginfo()”. http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/bloginfo

The most likely reason why next_post_link() doesn’t work in your theme is mostly do to how you setup the loop. The part of the loop that is most likely not setup is the “paging” part of it. Because paging isn’t setup you display the same content OVER and OVER each time you click on the “Newer Entries”. By setting up paging you are telling WordPress to display “X” amount of posts per page. The “offset” tells WordPress where to start on the next page.

I will post a screenshot of some code and go over what you need to do:

We need to use the “query_posts()” function (Line 15). In order to get the query that you want you should make a few variables first.

• On line 12 we create a variable called “ppp” (Posts Per Page) and give it a number.
• On line 13 we create the offset variable. This will help with a term called “Paging”.

Now that we have the variables setup we are going to create a custom WordPress Loop. To do this we need to make a new query.

• On line 15 I show you how to make a custom query using the variables we created earlier.

The query basically says: Go out and get me all the posts. I know I am going to be displaying “2” posts per page. Each time I go and click on “Newer Entries” start at the “offset” and then display another set of posts equaling whatever you set the “ppp” to be.

You might be asking yourself is there another way of doing this? Actually there is if you are using this as the only loop on a page and you want just spit out the blog entries.

Create a page template file and name it “pagetemplate.php” and put it into your theme directory. If you are using the same info in the screenshot the template name you will be able to select in the next step is going to be called “Playing with Loop”. *NOTE* – You won’t need lines 12 to 16!

Create a new page in WordPress and open it. I’m going to call my page “Blog”. On the right hand side under “Page Attributes” you see “Template”. Select “Playing with Loop” and hit update. You must now go and make some changes in the WP Admin area. Go to “settings” and “reading” and select the page that you want to be the default “Posts” page. Since as I previously mentioned I called my page “Blog” I am going to select “Blog” and voila. WordPress now knows that since this page is going to be displaying the posts, the paging will already be setup.

Like always, I like creating a function for this as it cleans up my template quite a bit. This also means I can re-use the code over and over again.

Open functions.php and add this to the end of the file:

Now anywhere in your theme you can get the date posted without dealing with the date format. All you need to do is type this:

Now that you know how to display the info it would make sense to put this in the functions.php and then call that function in your wordpress theme. To do this edit your functions.php and add this near the end of the file.

Now all you need to do in your theme is to call: