Posts in the category: wordpress

Sweet child of mine

child-theme

There are lots of great WordPress themes out there, but I always find something I’d like to change. Being open source, that’s pretty easy to do with a bit of CSS, HTML and PHP. However, when a theme is updated by the author, you risk loosing your hand-crafted customisation. That’s where child themes come in. They offer a simple, but flexible way to create a customised theme that inherits the style and function of it’s parent, but can be customised independently. And as any parent knows, their kids are always way cooler than their parents ;-)

WordPress Workshop

Printing Press

The more I use self-hosted installs of WordPress, the more I’ve learned about how powerful, flexible and useful it is. So in my role as a trainer for JISC Netskills I’m thinking of developing a workshop to distill that experience into something that other people might benefit from. I’m aware that there are lots of great resources out there already, so see the event as a day of supported practicals where participants can install WordPress (locally), play with plugins and themes and start to explore how WordPress is put together and can be customised. I have a plan, but would love to hear if you think it’s worthwhile or how it could be improved.

WordPress excerpts, featured images and <more>

post it notes

How to customise a WordPress blog to show more of your posts on the front page using the more tag, manual excerpts and featured images. Shows how simple changes to a standard theme can make significant changes to how a blog is presented.

Get with the programme

Get with the programme

I was recently tasked with setting up a community site for the JISC Greening ICT programme. Setting aside for now the rather tricky issue of ‘if you build it, they will come’, this post looks at the requirements for this site and the practicalities of using BuddyPress to provide it