The presentation started out with three important concepts: Ingredients, Care, and Craft. These concepts were illustrated with examples of some of the great local food and beverages that are produced in the Traverse City area. Thanks goes out to Matt and Carissa Visser of Isadore Farm for allowing me to use a photo of them at their farmer’s market booth. I suppose I should also thank Right Brain Brewery, Shorts Brewery, and Higher Grounds for making my most favorite inspiring beverages too.

Some of the topics we covered in this session were:

• Why install WordPress manually vs. the 1-click install
• How to choose a theme that works with your content
• How to choose plugins that won’t cause conflicts
• Where to go for reliable tutorials to help improve your craft

I related a few real life examples that I thought we could all learn from. One was about a site that I was contracted to rebuild after a failed first attempt by another developer. The problems with the site included the use of a theme that just did not work for the site owner’s content. For example, having more than three pages broke the site’s navigation layout. This theme was available as a free download at the wordpress.org theme repository. That’s right: it was available. Fortunately for the WordPress community, there is a crack team of theme reviewers now who review each and every theme that go into the repository. Older themes typically stay in unless they have a good reason to suspend them. Like a spammy footer link. A distinguished member of said team, Emil Uzelac, was present and made sure the theme was suspended after I demoed the spammy link that was output to the footer.

There was a little bit of code presented here and there throughout, and I hope that some of the newer WordPress users/developers in the audience could see the beauty in just how simple and clean WordPress code can be.

Many thanks to those who asked some great questions, offered some additional helpful tips, and gave kind words about the session. The slides from this presentation can be viewed at http://slidesha.re/slowcookwp.

Thanks to Mary Duquaine and Heather Acton, among the many others who worked so hard to make WordCamp Chicago 2011 a success. Also, a big thanks to all of the wicked awesome sponsors too.

A library for the creation of Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies, and Custom MetaBoxes on an EPIC Scale.

A very interesting plugin from Andrew Terris and Eric Marden. This will most certainly help out with some of the busy work with setting these up, included getting the permalinks working, custom icons, and some cool metabox functionality. No documentation as of early July ’11, (except within the code itself.)

in the .org repo:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/epic-post-type/

and on github:

https://github.com/aterris/epic-post-type

Here’s what a few experts have been writing about the dangers of grabbing themes from sketchy sources:
http://ottopress.com/2010/anatomy-of-a-theme-malware/

http://www.themelab.com/2009/12/08/stop-downloading-wordpress-themes-from-shady-sites/

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/12/10/theme-malware-anatomy

http://www.chipbennett.net/2010/12/10/only-download-wordpress-themes-from-trusted-sources/

A few places to get started:

Theme finder, a WPCandy project

WordPress.org Free Themes Directory

If you’ve got any good tips you’d like to share, please leave them in the comments.

WP.org vs WP.com from WooThemes on Vimeo.

In this example, we’ll build a landing page template off of the 2010 theme by means of a child theme. This will keep all changes protected from updates to the parent theme. The steps shown here could be used to build a landing page template for most other WordPress themes. You’ll need to be comfortable with editing WordPress template files, and know some CSS to make the final customizations. The code is available to check out at GitHub.

If you’re looking for a custom landing page solution that will integrate nicely into another theme, contact me for a quote.

Step 1: Add a new page with your landing page content. In our example you’ll see that I wrote up some typical landing page copy along with a signup form.

Step 2: Add a new folder to the theme directory, we’ll call it “twentytenland”

Step 3: Open a new document in your favorite editor, paste in the following CSS, then save this as “style.css” in the twentytenland folder.

/*
Theme Name: Twenty Ten Land
Description: A Child Theme of Twenty Ten
Template: twentyten
*/
@import url(../twentyten/style.css);

Step 4: Now we need to copy three files from the parent theme: header.php, footer.php and onecolumn-page.php. The 2010 theme has a one-column page template. If the theme you’re working with has one, use that. If not, use the regular page template. Paste these into the new child theme folder. Now we’ll modify these three new templates contained here.

Step 5: Modify the header template: Rename header.php to header-landing.php We’re going to remove the code and markup that produces the banner and navigation menu. Remove everything inside the header div. Now save this document. You could even remove the header div completely, but you might use it to put a minimal header in later.

Step 6: Modify the footer template: Rename footer.php to footer-landing.php. I removed the “site-info” and “site-generator” divs. I left in the sidebar footer code because it might be useful to have those widgets available. For example, you could put a contact form in one, a testimonial in another, etc.

Step 7: Modify the page template: Rename onecolumn-page.php to landing-page.php. Make the changes as shown below:

Step 7.5: With a recent WordPress update, the bundled version of the twentyten one column page template now calls the standard page loop which includes a comment block. Probably the simplest way to avoid including a comment form would be to turn off comments for this page. Look for the “Discussion” meta box and uncheck “Allow Comments”. If you can’t find the “Discussion” you will need to enable it from the “Screen Options” tab located in the upper right corner of the admin screen.

Step 8: Now head back to the WordPress admin panel and switch to this new theme. Then edit your example landing page. Inside the box labeled “Page Attributes” you can now choose “Landing Page.”

Step 9: Customize the CSS: You can now change the appearance with a few lines of CSS. In our example, I added a light background texture, and added some color and text shadow to the title and main heading. Note the body class used here to make these new styles only apply to our landing page template.

/*
Theme Name: Twenty Ten Land
Description: A Child Theme of Twenty Ten
Template: twentyten
*/
@import url(../twentyten/style.css);

.page-template-landing-page-php #wrapper{
	background:#fff url(images/bg-texture.png);
}

.page-template-landing-page-php #content .entry-title {
	color: #703999;
	font-size: 64px;
	text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px rgba(112,58,151,.2);
}

.page-template-landing-page-php h1 {
	text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px rgba(255,255,255,.8);

}

The example landing page:

Now make it your own!

Here are a few references to help you design, write and test better landing pages:

• Seal the Deal: 10 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page
• How to Create a ‘Landing’ Page Template using the Genesis Theme Framework. It’s much easier to do with Genesis.
• Landing pages: ten top tips
• 5 Beautiful Landing Pages That Prove Great Design Still Sells Landing pages don’t need to be ugly.
• How to do A/B Testing in WordPress Test and iterate!

The WordPress.org Codex has a detailed guide that includes a walk-through of installing XAMPP on Microsoft Windows®:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Test_Driving_WordPress

Mac OSX users can check out Installing WordPress Locally on Your Mac With MAMP, another guide from the Codex.

WAMP is an alternative to XAMPP for PC users, here’s a well written guide for that: Install a WordPress sandbox on a PC