Cameron Baney Design Blog » wordpress

WordPress Theme Minifier Plugin

Cameron Baney — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:44:56 +0000

The latest and great WordPress plugin has been released thanks to Squidesma, and it is incredibly useful and very easy to use. All you have to do is install it, and hit one button. Afterward, your selected theme has been optimized and minified.

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!

New features of WordPress 3.0

Cameron Baney — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:36:48 +0000

Very early Saturday morning, WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 was released for users to play with and test. They stressed that it is an early beta, but they didn’t want to wait anymore to release it. There are many new exciting features and enhancements. I installed the new version of WordPress to peak at what is new, and so far I am loving it. I will go over some of the new features, and give you a look at them.

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.

Neat Tweets #2

Cameron Baney — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:35:51 +0000

Neat Tweets is a weekly feature that showcases the best tweets of the week. These tweets can be an assortment of inspiration, tutorials, resources or freebies. I take the liberty to filter through all of the tweets of the week for the best of the best just so you don’t have to.

This week featuring:

jQuery plugins, WordPress plugins, 100,000+ free icons, free fonts and a showcase of 90+ creative agency websites

35 More Useful jQuery Plugins and Techniques

A variety of jQuery plugins to make your website look great while cutting down on production time. Plugins range from tables and forms to navigation or images.

More than 115,000 icons in one place

Icon Finder has always made it easy for a designer/developer to find nice looking icons for their projects. They took that one step further and showcased over 100,000 icons.

12 Essential Plugins that Extend WordPress as a CMS

WordPress has become a very popular content management system (CMS) for almost any site. These 12 plugins will make it even more easier to use.

A Beautiful Apple-style Slideshow Gallery With CSS & jQuery

A tutorial and source files on how to recreated Apple’s slideshow gallery they use on their website using CSS and jQuery.

50 creative web agencies

A showcase of 50 creative web agencies and their websites.

Friday Fresh Free Fonts

Friday Fresh Free Fonts is an amazing weekly feature on Abduzeedo that showcases and offers downloads to free fonts.

25 Clear And Beautiful Comparison Tables

A showcase of 25 comparison tables. Great inspiration for your next project.

44 Amazing Agency Websites

Another showcase of creative agency websites. This list includes graphic design and advertising agencies, and only repeats a few of the sites that were featured on Indeziner.

AutoSprites – A jQuery Menu Plugin

A jQuery plugin that makes it easy to create animated menus using CSS sprite sheets.

Neat Tweets #1

Cameron Baney — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:10:51 +0000

Web UI Treasure Chest v1.0

Version 1.0 of the Web UI Treasure Chest includes over 100 elements in a full, layered .PSD file. Most of the elements are editable, which makes it a perfect resource for your next web project.

5 Steps to winning any client project

FreelanceFolder published this excellent article for freelance designers. Being a freelance designer not only requires design skills, but also salesman skills. This articles gives you five steps to win clients, including why the step is needed and how to achieve it.