If you have spent anytime talking to people in either the Montreal or Toronto WordPress communities, chances are that at some point you have heard the name Brendan Sera-Shriar, or as he is more likely referred to, Digibomb.

Last year I attended and spoke at Make Web Not War, and I’m happy to say i will be attending and speaking again this year!

What is MWNW?
Coming to Montreal this May, Make Web Not War (MWNW) 2010 is one of Canada’s first cross-platform conference showcasing the latest techniques and technologies available to the ever-evolving web community, jointly sponsored by Microsoft and Open Source communities across Canada and PHP Quebec. Here we will explore the power and flexibility of new web paradigms, technologies and applications – including the Microsoft web platform, Open Source applications, cloud computing and mobile – to help you develop the ultimate web experience for your clients.

The wars of “platform religions” are over. Embrace the reality of today: mixed environments, interoperable applications, Open Source in harmony with commercial software, PHP on Windows and Azure cloud.The new technology era of pragmatism is here, and MWNW is about bridging the gap between different platforms, communities and developers of all trades and backgrounds.

Honestly, I can say I had a great time last year, met some really cool people, and was very impressed to see how far Microsoft has come in terms of outreaching to the Open Source community.

Hope to see you guy’s there!

This is the marketing video for this years event, they used footage from last year and I made the cut, twice, yay!

Last year Microsoft held an open source event in Canada called “Make Web Not War”. I have to admit they did a really good job. I was also fortunate enough to speak at the event in Toronto. As part of the event Microsoft held a coding competition called “FTW“, which was very successful, so successful it’s back!

What is The FTW! Coding Competition?

FTW! is where the best and brightest Canadian web developers go toe-to-toe to develop the next great Canadian Web App. How can you participate? Simply code or port a web application onto Windows/IIS or Windows Azure. That’s it, that’s all. All applications that fall into any of the following categories, and are on Windows/IIS or the Windows Azure Cloud are eligible.

Compete in the following categories:

• PHP Application: (PHP on Windows+IIS or PHP on Windows Azure)
• Windows Azure Application: (Any Language: .Net, PHP, Ruby, Python…)
• Open Data Application: (Use of Open Data Catalogues on Windows or Windows Azure on Any Language)

What could you win?

Along with an awesome grand prize worth fighting for (Dell Office Computer Make Over), the FTW! Coding Competition not only grants the winner bragging rights as one of Canada’s top web developers, but awards two runner-ups with top of the line Dell prizes as well. Once the hard work is done, a panel of industry judges will choose three finalists to battle it out for the grand prize at the “Make Web Not War” conference on May 27th in Montreal!

How can you register?

If you want more information on how to register to the competition please visit: http://www.webnotwar.ca/ftw/

See you at the finals in Montreal!

I would also like to thank all those that tweeted my presentation, and all those who came and spoke with me after and through out Confoo.

Here’s my presentation:

The good people of PHP Quebec have asked me to speak at CONFOO this year! I am very excited about this presentation, I have spoken at many conferences and it is always nice to do one you have not done before.

I will be doing a session on WordPress theming, description below…

WordPress is NOT just a blog anymore!

For the seasoned WordPress developer or anyone coding in PHP, CSS, and jQuery, we will look at how you can take your theme to the next level. I will explain how theme architecture works, how to extend this architecture with custom template files, and how to create custom functions. I will also walk through the some interested CSS frameworks, like 960grid, implementing intermediate to advanced jQuery features, and how to customize the back end. Finally I will briefly discuss how to take your theme mobile using WPTouch and WPMobile.

What’s CONFOO

PHP Québec, Montréal-Python, Montréal on Rails, W3Qc and OWASP Montréal are proud to announce the first edition of the Confoo.ca Conference. From March 10^th to 12^th 2010, international experts in Java, .Net, PHP, Python and Ruby will present solutions for developers and project managers the prestigious Hilton Bonaventure Hotel, located in downtown Montréal.

There’s only 15 days left to register!

Hope to see you all there!

–

Check out some of the slide from other events I have presented at.

As a designer/developer I dug into the core early on (ver 2.0), wanting to get a better understanding of how WordPress works and how I can customize the overall experience for my clients. I’ve designed custom login pages and dashboards for almost every WordPress project I’ve worked on since.

If you have even a basic understanding of CSS and are familiar with how the basics of PHP works in WordPress you can do more than you think quite easily.

How to get started
There are essentially 3 ways we can customize the dashboard.

1. plugins (don’t always meet every need)
2. core files (can change with every new version of WP)
3. functions.php (flexible and simple)

After reading quite a few posts over at wprecipes and wpbeginner, I recommend/prefer using the functions.php file, it’s cleaner, and more flexible when it comes to versioning.

First, let’s take a look at the basic architecture of the dashboard or for the sake of this discussion the admin area. Everything you need to get started is located in the wp-admin directory.

wp-admin (what we need)

• login.css
• dashboard.css
• wp-admin.css
• admin.php
• admin-header.php
• admin-footer.php
• menu.php

These files will allow you to make basic changes to the overall look and feel.

Login Page
Here are 2 great examples

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-of-best-wordpress-custom-login-page-designs/

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-of-best-wordpress-custom-login-page-designs/

Open login.css and you can modify the colours, images, and the form. There are also a handful of plugins available, here are 2 you should check out Custom Admin Branding and BM Custom Login . You should also read “Best of Best WordPress Custom Login Page Designs” by wpbeginner.

You can also add a few lines of code to your functions.php file and achieve the same outcome without having to install a plugin or a lot of coding.

Open up your functions.php file or create one if the theme you’re working on does not have one and add the following code to add a custom logo on the login page.

function my_custom_login_logo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}

The above code modifies the default h1 class by changing the background image to a custom logo file stored in your themes images directory.

Admin Header
If you wanted to change the dashboard logo (top left corner) you could modify admin-header.php. You can also change the visit link and welcome message.

<img src="../wp-includes/images/blank.gif" alt="" width="32" height="32" /> <h1 id="site-heading" <?php echo $title_class ?>><a href="<?php echo trailingslashit( get_bloginfo('url') ); ?>" title="<?php _e('Visit Site') ?>"><span><?php echo $blog_name ?></span> <em id="site-visit-button"><?php _e('Visit Site') ?></em></a></h1>

To change the logo we need to edit line 104 (depending on your editor) or look for img id=”header-logo

All you need to do is change the img src to point to your logo file. One other thing I like to modify is the visit link. Why does it open in the same window? I’m not sure about you? but when I’m working I rather have it open in a new window, so I add target=”_blank” in the href tag.

One more thing you may want to change is the welcome message in the top right corner, “Howdy, webmaster”.

Go to line 108 or search for howdy

<p><?php printf(__('Howdy, <a href="%1$s" title="Edit your profile">%2$s</a>'), 'profile.php', $user_identity) ?>

Change Howdy to whatever you want, simple!

Now, here’s how to do it using functions.php:

add_action('admin_head', 'my_custom_logo');
function my_custom_logo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
#header-logo { background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/dash_logo.png) !important; }</style>';
}

Admin Footer
Open admin-footer.php and go to line 23 or search for admin_footer_text

echo apply_filters( 'admin_footer_text', '<span id="footer-thankyou">' . __('Thank you for creating with <a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a>.').'</span> | '.__('<a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/">Documentation</a>').' | '.__('<a href="http://wordpress.org/support/forum/4">Feedback</a>') ); ?></p>

Now add your own text, links, and images.

Now, here’s how to do it using functions.php:

function remove_footer_admin () {
echo "Your own text";
}
add_filter('admin_footer_text', 'remove_footer_admin');

Widgets
Creating custom widgets are very useful and a lot of fun. Let’s add a simple ads window that will be viewable to all users logged in. I’m only going to show you how to do this in functions.php, it’s a lot easier. However, if you are feeling adventuress you can do this in the core.

To modify the core open dashboard.php located in wp-admin/includes/. You will notice all the main dashboard widgets are at the top of the file ending around line 50 in my editor. You can also play around with the current widgets, for example you can change the default WordPress dev feeds to any feed you want. I usually load feeds from my other blogs or resource sites.

…ok, so let’s add a widget using functions.php.

Add the following code to you functions.php file:

add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'my_custom_dashboard_widgets');

function my_custom_dashboard_widgets() {

global $wp_meta_boxes;

wp_add_dashboard_widget('custom_ad_widget', 'Ads', 'custom_dashboard_ad');

}

function custom_dashboard_ad() {

echo '<p>Check out some other cool stuff</p><br /><img src="http://www.dropthedigibomb.com/dropit.jpg" />';

}

A few things to note: The second last line is where you define the name of the widget that displays in the dashboard ‘Ads’, so you can name this anything you want. The echo, this is where you can add any basic html to output text and images. If you have a more advanced knowledge of PHP, then you can go ahead and add CSS or jQuery, pretty much anything.

Now go and have fun!

Resources:

http://wpengineer.com

http://www.wprecipes.com

http://www.wpbeginner.com

http://buildinternet.com/2010/01/create-custom-option-panels-with-wordpress-2-9

Recently I had to revisit this piece of code for a project I am working on and thought I’d share since it’s pretty useful and simple.

We use the standard WP search form code to start

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
<label for="s"><?php _e('Search for:'); ?></label>
<input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
</form>

We add this line of code

<input type="hidden" name="cat" value="1" />

This hidden field is what allows us to search a specific category.  This string will be added to the search parameter. For example; the normal search would be something like http://wwwdropthedigibomb.com/?s=(what ever keyword was used), with the hidden field we get http://wwwdropthedigibomb.com/?s=(what ever keyword was used)&cat=1.  The value attribute refers to the ID number of your category. This is the only thing  you will need to change.

Here is the final code

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
<label for="s"><?php _e('Search for:'); ?></label>
<input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
<input type="hidden" name="cat" value="1" />
</form>

Enjoy!

Original Post Nov 3rd

I will be presenting at PHP Quebec this month, Thursday Nov 5th at around 830pm, looking at how WordPress uses its own brand of  PHP for custom plugins, themes, and backend design. I will walk through the basic theme architecture using template tags and understanding how they relate to PHP and how to customize and extend them. I will also show you how you can convert a basic PHP function into a plugin. Finally, I will introduce basic/intermediate customization of  the dashboard, how to create custom panels, login screens, etc.

In case I run out of time, or miss a few things, here is a list of resources to get you started or answer any questions you have. I will also update this post with my slides after the presentation. Also,  feel free to check out  some of my other presentations from past events.

General

• Official WordPress Theme Architecture Outline and Cheat Sheet
• WordPress Cheat Sheet by Andy Wibbels (pdf)
• HeadZoo WordPress Plugin API Cheatsheet (png)
• HeadZoo WordPress Themes Cheatsheet
• Diary of a Rock Star – WordPress Cheat Sheet
• Kahi’s WordPress Notes – WordPress Cheat Sheets Summarized

Theming

• http://themeshaper.com/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
• http://www.wpsnap.com/
• http://freethemelayouts.com/
• http://www.styleshout.com
• http://wpcandy.com/

Plugins

• Simplified AJAX For WordPress Plugin Developers using Jquery
• “Desenvolvendo Plugins para WordPress” by Rafael Dohms (in Brazilian Portuguese)
• 12 part “How to Write a WordPress Plugin” at DevLounge.net by Ronald Huereca (PDF)
• How to create WordPress Plugin from a scratch
• Using AJAX with your WordPress Plugin, also at DevLounce.net
• How to Write a Simple WordPress Plugin at ATD