6 useful Thematic snippets

I thought I’d write some­thing web­design related to fill the almost empty Web­design cat­egory on this blog, and since I use the Them­atic Theme Frame­work and find it is the best thing that can hap­pen to a Word­Press blog I decided to share a couple of modi­fic­a­tions for it. (These snip­pets go into the functions.php file of your child theme).

Integ­rat­ing cus­tom taxonomies

OK, so with the release of Word­Press 2.8 cus­tom tax­onom­ies became really very easy. They’re used on all kinds of blogs, from mark­ing post series on web­dev tutorial blogs to lib­rary man­age­ment on stream­ing portals. What you usu­ally see at the bot­tom meta of our posts as ‘in con­nec­tion with’ is the fol­low­ing modi­fic­a­tion in con­nec­tion with the Anime Drop­down Wid­get I developed. (The wid­get cre­ates a cus­tom tax­onomy called ‘anime’ and lets you organ­ize related posts bet­ter way).

[cc lang=“php”]
func­tion addaftercat($postcat) {
global $post;
$sep = “”;
$taxonomy_slug = “anime”; //The unique slug of the tax­onomy tags to show
$con­text = ” in con­nec­tion with “; //Any text, like ’ filed under ’ or whatever
if(!is_single()):
$sep = ’ |’;
endif;
$tax­ono­mytags = get_the_term_list($post->ID, $taxonomy_slug, $con­text, ‘, ‘, $sep);

return $postcat.$taxonomytags;
}

add_filter (‘thematic_postfooter_postcategory’, ‘addafter­cat’);
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All you need to cus­tom­ize here is $taxonomy_slug and $context.

Insert­ing things right after posts

Although it’s been annoy­ing me lately, the fam­ous blog­ger Danny Choo has a huge self-promotion text after each post, encour­aging reader to sub­scribe to his RSS feed and fol­low him on what-not. As if some­body wouldn’t have done it already… Any­way, it’s the easi­est of things to do:

[cc lang=“php”]
func­tion addfeedpromotion($content) {
$insert = “”;
if(is_singular()):
$insert = ‘If you liked read­ing this post, sub­scribe to our RSS feed to get more of it right to your feedreader!’;
endif;

return $con­tent;
}

add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wt_addids’);
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This inserts the RSS link after the text of each post on single pages.

Mak­ing post images linkable-to

I have never seen this on Word­Press blogs, but the above-mentioned Danny Choo’s images all have an id attrib­ute which makes them linkable-to via #imageid. The fol­low­ing code is inven­ted by me though, I thought of releas­ing a plu­gin but didn’t see that some­body needed it at all. Mostly because the major­ity of people I know are not pho­tob­log­gers or art-bloggers. Any­way, this code wrap all images in a post in div-tags with the ID of the image as in the Word­Press database.

[cc lang=“php”]
func­tion addimageids($content) {
if(is_singular()):
$con­tent = preg_replace(‘/(?:|]*>?)]*class=”([^”]*)wp-image-(\d+)[^>]*\/>(?:|>\/a[^>]*>?)/’, ‘

‘, $con­tent);
endif;

return $con­tent;
}

add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘addim­ageids’, 9999);
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As you see it also cop­ies each image’s class so there shouldn’t be any align­ment prob­lems. On this blog, the trans­par­ent link on the images is added via JavaS­cript, although you can hard­code it or let it be at all.

Remov­ing Thematic-specific scripts

If you’re not going to use the page menu effects, you prob­ably would want to remove the unne­ces­sary scripts from header. Or altern­at­ively, you could replace them and/or other scripts with a com­pressed ver­sion with help of Minify. Either way, you’ll need this code snippet:

[cc lang=“php”]
func­tion modi­fy­scripts() {
$con­tent = “\n”;
$con­tent .= ”; //Put own scripts here if you want
$con­tent .= “\n”;

return $con­tent;
}

add_filter(‘thematic_head_scripts’,‘modifyscripts’);
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Remove default stylesheet linking

I wouldn’t know why you would want to remove the stylesheets, but this snip­pet is actu­ally exactly the same as the above one, and is very good for optim­iz­ing page load times. In this example we will replace the default link­ing to the optim­ized ver­sion of it (optim­ized with the pre­vi­ously linked Minify, assum­ing you have it installed in your blog’s root folder):
[cc lang=“php”]
func­tion optimizestylesheet($content) {
$con­tent = ‘ ’;

return $con­tent;
}

add_filter(‘thematic_create_stylesheet’, ‘optim­ize­stylesheet’);
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Adding meta to <head>

Like, if you want to add Google veri­fic­a­tion code or some­thing sim­ilar (or gen­er­ally any stuff one can put into the head of a page), use this snippet:

[cc lang=“php”]
func­tion meta­th­ings() {
?>

<?php
}

add_filter(‘wp_head’, ‘meta­th­ings’);
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Ini­tially I planned to intro­duce 10 of them snip­pets, but at last there weren’t too many I didn’t already see else­where to begin with. More than that, you see those 10÷50÷100 so often that I thought it’d be nice to have num­ber without the null at least once. ^^

All of the above code ‘excerpts’ (to not repeat the word ‘snip­pet’ again, as that would be a styl­istic fail­ure for me) (oh sh-) are used on a², just so you know. With that, I con­clude my first real (if you approve of its ‘real­ness’) web­design post on Anime².

Fur­ther reading

• Them­atic
• All Them­atic resources and tutori­als you might need if ‘child theme’ is a new word for you and not only
• Cus­tom tax­onom­ies? What’s that?
• Not exactly related, but other Word­Press plu­gins by me