Minified?

What exactly does minified mean? The plugin goes through your entire theme and takes out unnecessary code and space, as well as optimizes it. Extra spacing between elements in your markup and CSS is great for development because it separates everything into sections, but you don’t need these extra spaces for production. Visitors on your website can’t tell if there is extra spacing in the markup or not when just viewing the website, so why have it there? That extra spacing bloats your file size which in turn causes longer load times and increased bandwidth usage.

Customizable and Reversible

Many may be worried that this plugin is going to break your theme. After all those hours and long nights of coding your perfect theme, you don’t want it to all be destroyed by a plugin. Worry not, Theme Minifier understands and has your back. There are various levels that you can minify your theme. The standard level will rip out all the white space in your markup. You can also choose which method to use when the plugin optimizes your JavaScript: JSMin or Packer. JSMin is the default because it is the most popular and most used, and Packer is often considered evil, however it results in smaller file size. You can then take it a step further and optimize your site’s CSS. For now, using this CSS optimization will break any CSS3 styles that you may be using such as any -moz or -webkit tags because it is not valid CSS.

After you choose your settings and the plugin runs, it will create a copy of your theme, and it will not automatically make your site use the new theme. If something in the theme would break and the plugin forced your site to use the new theme, all of your visitors would immediately see the broken theme. You will also have a backup which you can revert to at anytime in case there is a problem.

Having two copies of your theme, one original theme and one minified, has another advantage other than speed and optimization. You can deliver the minified theme to your visitors, and still have the markup laid out the way you like it. The original theme then becomes the development theme, which you can make all of your changes to with ease. When you are done making the changes, you can simply run the plugin again to minify the new changes.

Image Optimization

The Theme Minifier will also analyze and convert your images to whatever file type is the most efficient. Just like your theme, it will create a new version of every image it converts so your original images aren’t gone forever and damaged. Theme Minifier shows you a nice table showing what images it converted and gives you details like how much space you can save by using the new format. If you choose to use the new images, it is up to you to make the necessary changes in the markup.

Risk Free

Since the plugin gives you options and backs up your theme, why not try it out? It will only take a few seconds to install, and just as long to run. Make sure to visit the plugin’s page in the WordPress Plugin Directory or visit the author’s blog about the plugin. After your run the plugin, it will even give you a report on how much you saved, and where it was saved.

How Much Space Did You Save?

After you install and run the plugin, comment below and let us know how much space you saved!

Supported CSS

There may be some things that you don’t have to change for your mobile site’s CSS. Opera supports all of the advanced CSS selectors and pseudo classes that you have grown to love. Opera also supports the following CSS3 that you may have already been using:

• text-shadow
• RGBA
• outline

Assuming you have been using -webkit specific CSS code, you may need to add some more CSS to get it to look right in Opera. Opera uses a mix of the generic properties, as well as specific Opera properties which has the “-o-” in front of the normal property such as “-o-box-sizing”.

Box Shadows

box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.4);

Rounded Corners

border-radius: 5px;

Box Sizing

-o-box-sizing: border-box;

Transforms

Transforms can be done by using the special “-o-” property. In this example I am going to be rotating my element.

-o-transform: rotate(7.5deg);

Gradients

This was one of my favorite CSS3 properties. Unfortunately, this is one of the properties that Opera doesn’t support yet. Since Opera Mini is a regular iPhone app, they can put out regular updates. If they do support CSS gradients eventually, the update will be made available to all users.

More resources

CSS3 Please – A quick guide that lets you see how to create different effects right on the site. The CSS on the site is editable, and all the changes are reflected live on the site.

CSS3 Generator – A very quick tool that lets you select what you want to do, and gives you all CSS code for each browser (if available) to achieve it

New installation

I noticed new features before WordPress finished installing. The installation process has been reworked to make it more friendly and your blog more customized from the beginning. You now have the opportunity to chose your username, so you can have something other than the old default, “admin”. In addition, you can set your password right at the installation screen. There is no more automatically generated password, and the “Hey, change your password!” reminder when you first sign in. This not only reduces the steps you need to take to set up your site, but increases security greatly.

Since they added the password reminder, most people do change their password right away when they install, but some may forget about it. Hackers may be able to get into your site using a tool that generates passwords similar to WordPress’ generator. Now your site can have a custom password from the beginning, and a custom username if you wish. Hackers will have to guess your username and your password.

New themes

New backend theme

The WordPress backend theme has been updated to a more modern looking grey color. In addition to the color, the font in the content editor for pages and posts has changed. It got a bump up in size and change from black to a dark grey.

New site theme, Twenty Ten

The default theme has been updated as well. The new theme, aptly named “Twenty Ten”, includes support for all of the new features, and six widget areas. There are two widget areas in the right sidebar, and four in the footer.

Comments directly on the page/post in the backend

When you’re viewing a page or post in the backend, you can now view all the comments that have been posted to it. The new comments section is not a replacement for the existing comments section, it’s just a way to extend it. In the new section, you can control all aspects of the comment like you can now in the existing section.

Theme management

The themes section has been revamped to include tabs for your existing themes, and to install themes. Both of these functions are available now, but the tabs make them more prominent. In WordPress 2.9, there is also no way to get back to the “Manage Themes” page without selecting it from the menu on the left, or using your back button.

Menu system

This may be one of my favorite new features. Keep in mind that this is far from complete. They say that it will not function/look the same in the next beta, but they didn’t want to hold up the beta release for this one section.

The new menu system gives non-web-savvy people control over their menus on their website. I just had an experience that this menu system would have been perfect for. I created a client’s site that had all menus and dropdowns dynamically populating from their pages and categories. They only wanted some of these pages to be displayed, so I created a custom field solution to display certain pages in the menu.

With this new menu system, users can just go into the “Menus” page and select what they want to display in the menu. Users can create multiple menus, which can then be placed on the page via PHP code or widgets. Users can put any link in the menu they want. They can link an existing page or category, and even custom links to any URL. When linking to an existing page or category, the user can search for the page name, and WordPress will find all the pages with that word in the title. From the results, that link can added to the menu.

Miscellaneous Features

There are a few other new features such as the ability to change the background and header images within the backend. I’m assuming these are theme dependent features, but I haven’t tested them out yet. There is also a new “featured image” area when editing a post or page. I added a featured image to one of the posts, but didn’t notice any changes. I’m assuming this feature isn’t quite finished.

Explore WordPress 3.0

If you want to check out WordPress 3.0 for yourself, hop over to the WordPress blog post and download the release! Leave a comment if you find a new feature that I have missed, or comment about your favorite new feature.

Changing your website around for a month to get into the spirit can do wonders for your traffic. It shows your visitors that you’re still there, and you want to keep things fresh. In addition, it shows the visitors that you stay current with what is happening in the world. I always found it exciting when TV shows had a holiday special, or even had the seasons change in the show when they really did in the world. Adding holiday changes to your website will excite your users as well. In addition to keeping current, your new holiday look could bring in some new visitors. Your current viewers might love the new look so much that they will tell their friends.

Smashing Magazine

Made Me LOL

Aion

Queness

Newegg

Hershey Park

Krop

Have you seen a holiday website?

Drop a link in the comments to show off holiday websites that you have found, or even your own!

I will be posting everything from website showcases for inspiration to tutorials and even my favorite tweets. Aside from my blog, you can also follow me on twitter: @cameronbaney where I tweet about everything web design.