The new version is 1.1.1 and you can download it from the release page: Future Day WordPress Theme.

Frankly I’d think Google wouldn’t look too positively on password protected posts, but also think that they wouldn’t be so cruel as to add negative marks to your site link for having such posts. Possibly they simply ignore them. Can anyone confirm?

Google however, does offer some good advice on this, with their First Click Free (that’s a link to a google page).

The new version is 1.0.4 and has been tested out on WordPress 3.1 and works well. In case you install it without reading any notices – this theme is designed to work with three widgets; these get displayed underneath the content, above the footer. If you add more widgets, they will get displayed in one of the three columns, but does not distribute evenly across the three.

If you want to take a look at it, please see for yourself: Horizontal WordPress Theme; if you have suggestions just comment on this post and I’ll catch up with you here.

There are some things that may not get included in this new release, as I want to recode them later on (such as support for child theme versions). Other pieces are included this time around, even though they’ll also be recoded.

Also, GRS has moved to use the NextGEN gallery plugin on the front page (and category pages). This has caused a bit of a problem since they now use a page as the front page. Since the posts on the front page are specifically coded to not display tags, the csv_tags() functions doesn’t work properly.

So I had to alter it, and thought a better way of doing this would be to check for the NextGEN gallery and use the alt text. Here is the new altered csv_tags() function:

function csv_tags() {
 if (is_home() || is_front_page()) {
  global $wpdb;
  $results = $wpdb->get_results(‘SELECT alttext FROM wp_ngg_pictures WHERE galleryid = 1 AND exclude = 0′);
  foreach ($results as $row) {
   $csv_tags .= $row->alttext . ‘,’;
  }
 } else {
  $posttags = get_the_tags();
  foreach((array)$posttags as $tag) {
   $csv_tags .= $tag->name . ‘,’;
  }
 }
 echo ‘<meta name=”keywords” content=”‘.$csv_tags.’” />’;
}

By this I mean that the majority of the site, while looking like a normal website, is in fact built on the WordPress platform. Then there is the ‘blog’ section of the site which is more straightforward and has all the usual things you might expect to see such as a datestamp, byline and so on.

We kept the same two column layout, but completely changed the design. This new design allowed for space at the top to display larger amounts of information. This let the site show main categories such as Bespoke Signs, Vehicle Livery etc.,

Another major point that was required was that single posts have a larger version of the image associated with it. If you look at a single post, you can see the same image above the post title – clicking on it displays a larger version. Since the GRS fitters take good high quality photographs, this is a good way of using them.

The site now has a lot of integration with social media. Each post displays various social media icons that viewers can use to spread the url. Like the older design, people can also comment on posts.

One of my themes has a generated sidebar title for the default sidebar. However, on the dynamic version of this when someone chooses their widgets, it uses the standard construction inside a functions.php file via register_sidebar() to construct the structure of the widget. This is common for 99% of the themes, and would never really need to be looked at, like so:

if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’))
 register_sidebar(array(‘name’ => ‘sidebar1′,
  ’before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
  ’after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,
  ’before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”widgettitle”>’,
  ’after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
 ));

Clearly though, this is unacceptable when you need to generate the sidebar title and have a specific font for it, that is created from a script. It was quite difficult in finding this little known function, but Adrian Mummey has written a great article on it and shown how to use it.

So first of all, I cleaned out that sidebar registration in the functions.php file, so now it’s bare like so:

if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’))
 register_sidebar(array(‘name’ => ‘sidebar1′,
  ’before_widget’ => ”,
  ’after_widget’ => ”,
  ’before_title’ => ”,
  ’after_title’ => ”,
 ));

Now, further down in the same functions.php file follow Adrian’s instructions and add this:

add_filter(‘dynamic_sidebar_params’, ‘reclamation_sidebar_params’);

For me this was part of the theme I was fixing, Reclamation, so I named my function reclamation_sidebar_params(). This is where the magic is, here is that function which I fleshed out:

function reclamation_sidebar_params($params){
 $params[0]['before_widget'] = ‘<div class=”block”><div class=”block_title”>’;
 $params[0]['before_title'] = ‘<h3><img src=”‘ . get_bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’) . ‘/sidebartitles.php?letters=’ . @$params[0]['widget_name'] . ‘” />’;
 $params[0]['after_widget'] = ‘</div><div class=”block_bottom”>  $params[0]['after_title'] = '</h3></div>

 return $params;
}

This function lets you really got to town on the sidebar parameters, which the ordinary method does not. Now with the code above as you can see, I called a php file called sidebartitles.php which created the text using a separate font. This is one method of making sure a theme uses a font regardless of whether the viewer has it on their machine.

So thanks to Adrian, this is a method to really tailor your sidebar, very useful if you’re a theme author and want to go to town on your creation.

Then I found a great post by Matt at Webmaster-Source. He detailed a way to upload an image in the functions.php file, absolutely perfect for what I wanted. But my problem was that I needed multiple media uploads on the page, which he nearly had but just needed a slight alteration.

Basically add a simple form with these two lines in:

<input id=”upload_image” type=”text” size=”36″ name=”upload_image” value=”" />
<input id=”upload_image_button” type=”button” value=”Upload Image” />

So here is his javascript (jquery) code that handles it:

$(document).ready(function() {
 $(‘#upload_image_button’).click(function() {
  formfield = $(‘#upload_image’).attr(‘name’);
  tb_show(”, ‘media-upload.php&type=image&TB_iframe=true’);
  return false;
 });

 window.send_to_editor = function(html) {
  imgurl = $(‘img’,html).attr(‘src’);
  $(‘#upload_image’).val(imgurl);
  tb_remove();
 }
});

So I altered it just a tiny little bit and here is the alteration. The first bit is to take his first function and slightly alter it for each instance of the form, the ‘upload_image_button‘ id and the formfield variable that selects the ‘upload_image‘ id:

 $(‘#upload_image_button’).click(function() {
  formfield = $(‘#upload_image’).attr(‘name’);
  tb_show(”, ‘media-upload.php?type=image&TB_iframe=true’);
  return false;
 });

In the second function, use the variable that he had set up earlier (formfield):

 window.send_to_editor = function(html) {
  imgurl = $(‘img’,html).attr(‘src’);
  $(‘#’ + formfield).val(imgurl);
  tb_remove();
 }

That should do it. Every time the media file is selected, then the submit/upload button event puts the media (image, in my case) url into the input box. Use your functions.php know-how to save it as an option for your theme, and use it as a background etc.,

What has changed? Well I have added twitter support, so in the admin backend you can put your twitter username, and how many tweets to show, and then in the widgets section add a widget to a sidebar to show them.

Also there has been a minor fix in the excerpts section. People have reminded me that I had left in references to the_excerpt_reloaded() which shouldn’t be there, and I’ve put it back to the_excerpt().

So far so good, it’s nearly done. The final bits and pieces are now under way, the browser work to make sure it’s ok on all (most) browsers. I will -not- be developing for IE6, it’s a waste of time.

At this point that’s about it, I had hoped to get it done for this weekend, but it looks like this week.

Someone had asked about jquery – yes it’ll have jquery, and yes you’ll need it.