Justin Carlson has posted the 45-minute video of Tris Hussey and I speaking on WordPress 3.0 and child themes–check it out and listen to me nasally “um” and “uh” my way through the audience’s questions!

Finally, our presentation slides make sense!

For videos of the other speakers, check out Justin’s blog post.

Both during and after our presentation, I fielded a few questions, most of which were variations on a theme. I’d like to go over those now.

WordPress 3.0 and Child Themes: Frequently Asked Questions

1. When should I upgrade to WordPress 3.0?

Right now. It’s ready, it works, and updating WordPress is (usually) very easy. Keeping your WordPress and plugins current is the best defense against having your site hacked. (Assuming your password is not ‘password’ or ‘secret’, that is. If it is, go change it right now.)

2. When should I use a child theme?

All the time. If you want to modify your site’s look and feel beyond changing the background image on Twenty Ten, you need a child theme.

3. Why? That sounds crazy. Don’t you emphasize in your presentation that my current theme will still work exactly the same way?

Sure, and I’m a big proponent of doing as little work as possible while staying current. Yes, the WordPress 1.x theme you’ve been using since 2004 will still work on WP 3.0. Yes, the functionality will remain the same. However, if basing a new theme on an existing one, establishing it as a child both reduces the amount of code you need to change while keeping it separate and independent of the parent.

If you build themes from scratch–say, like me, for example–it’s far better to work from the same initial structure, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time. In the past, that might have involved copying the same code over to a new theme and working from there.

With child themes, I can set the background, column width, colours and typography for a new site with fewer than a dozen declarations, isolating only the changes relevant to that site in a separate CSS file. The key benefit of this becomes apparent when performing updates. Suppose I add a new feature to my child theme’s functions.php, or find a cleaner way to format dates in style.css. I can then copy those changes back to the parent theme, allowing me to very quickly add that functionality to existing sites without having to touch their respective child themes.

4. But when would that ever happen? Seriously, isn’t that kind of an edge case?

WordPress 3.0 adds extraordinary new levels of control over author templates, giving us the ability to style individual authors’ profiles for the first time. Future versions of WordPress may contain similar features to allow us to more flexibly aggregate lists of users, a greater range of default fields, and so on. By limiting the changes necessary to your own theme to accommodate these hypothetical future additions to WordPress, you can be assured that your site will gain features as your parent theme is updated, rather than being locked into static functionality long after future versions of WordPress give you blogging and styling features we can only dream about today.

5. Custom content types: should I be using those?

Maybe.

Consider the following scenario: You have a bunch of posts. Some of those posts are reviews. Reviews can quickly fall out of date, so they need updates. These updates should be very clear to users, allowing them to quickly see how old–and therefore relevant–a review is. So, what to do?

• Option A: We need types. Lots of types.

  Create a custom post type called “Reviews” and one named “Review Updates”, that in turn, can be associated with the Reviews type. Both can be easily themed differently than your standard Post and Page types.

• Option B: Custom Fields

  Create your “Reviews” type, but add custom fields to it, allowing for those updates right in the post itself. That might be cleaner, though it would be tougher to add features to your blog like a “Recent Updates” sidebar widget, if that’s something you’d like–now or in future.

• Option C: Just leave it alone.

  Alternatively, you could just add “Update, June 25th, 2010″ to the bottom of the post, surrounding it with a DIV, allowing you to style “updates” accordingly. You’d have much less work ahead of you, and you wouldn’t run into problems with your custom post type not fitting the content.

  

  This latter method is actually what I’m doing on this very site with my new feature, Catherine Uses…. It’s just easier for me to copy and paste a little code, adapting it as necessary.

  As I’ve written before, plain text will always be more flexible — at least, if you’re the only one editing your blog. If this custom post type would be used by a dozen different writers, it can make more sense to standardize rather than train everyone on adding DIV tags to all their updates.

6. When should I use Multisite?

This is actually a fairly complicated answer for a number of reasons.

Short answer: you shouldn’t. If there’s a choice between using multisite and not, my recommendation is that you don’t. If you have no choice, IE, you’re running dozens of WordPress blogs on the same server, well, at least WordPress and WordPress MU have the same codebase now.

Got another question on WordPress 3.0 or parent/child themes? Feel free to ask in the comments!

As promised, Tris Hussey and I presented “WordPress 3.0 & Parent-Child Themes”

Being a generally nice sort of person, I let Tris cover the whole, “check it, I’m dragging categories and posts and things into a menu” bit–definitely a crowd-pleaser, that.

As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m hoping to post a quick FAQ up tomorrow answering the four or five main questions I’ve been asked after our presentation. (Ooh, magazine themes! Picking good parent themes! Multisite! Etc!)

For our slides, please consult Tris’ SlideShare account, or move your eyes slightly downward to the embedded SlideShare widget immediately following this sentence.

Also, be sure to check out Tris’ thoughts at his blog!

Update: For those who have asked, yes, it does appear that WordCamp was filmed, and on what appeared to be a Canon XL H1, so with any luck, we can all look forward to checking out my pores.

I’m pleased to confirm that, yes, I will be at WordCamp Vancouver 2010 on June 12. I’ll be speaking with Tris Hussey about the upcoming (Possibly just-released by then!) WordPress 3.0 and child themes. For more information about child themes, check out Tris’ blog.

Personally, I’m excited about the new content types and menu features available in WP 3.0 and I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with them. Remember, WordPress isn’t just for blogs!

As a longtime Drupal developer, I’m particularly impressed to realize that all but three sites I’ve ever worked on could be implemented in WordPress 3.0 as or more easily than the Drupal, ExpressionEngine, or Plone backends they were built with. As such, I’ll be paying close attention to the “WordPress as a CMS” panel discussion with Christine Rondeau, Cam Cavers, and Dave Zille.

I’ll also be volunteering at the WP Genius Bar, where I’ll be free to answer any questions you might have or help fix any problems you might be having with your blog. I’m particularly happy to offer advice on WP 3.0 or child themes, topics I enjoy doing more than just give talks about.

If you don’t already have tickets to WordCamp Vancouver, I’m afraid they’ve sold out, so tough beans. However, as the WordCamp Vancouver site notes:

Tickets are currently sold out, but we’re hoping to release a few more before the event, so hang tight!

Fingers crossed!

I hope to see you there–and if you have any questions about child themes, leave a comment on this post! I’d love to hear about what people are interested in.

So I got it, only to discover that all the config fields were empty. Apparently version 1.6.4 has a bit of a problem with not prepopulating the fields with the proper strings and escape characters. Whoops.

Fortunately, Tris found a site that had a giant screenshot of the actual settings here. So in the event that you’re taking advice about the version 1.6.4 of the All in One SEO pack for WordPress, do check that out, won’t you? You’ll have to retype everything, but still, awesome.

I really don’t want to see this yellow “All in One SEO Pack must be configured” message at the top of all my posts, and hey, better SEO stuff would be super, too, so I’m fixing that right now.

If you’re not using it, you should be. More hits are better hits.

(Thanks, Tris!)

• “Catherine, do you want anything?“
  “No, I’ll get something upstairs at WordPress.“
  ”…what?”
• “Raul, is that your phone?“
  “No, it’s WordPress’–WordCamp–Work. Space. It’s Workspace’s phone.”

Which is good, because he very graciously tolerated my inadvertent inviting-myself-along-to-dinner last night, and answered my questions about categories and post visibility and things.

And even more importantly, he brought his incredibly fancy bicycle panniers that I want now that he’s showed them off to me.

The Axiom Lesalle panniers come with all kinds of crazy features: as this review notes, you could take them in the shower. You know, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

These bags come with waterproof covers, but the bags themselves are water resistant and I haven’t yet bothered using the covers. Lacking a true deluge in which to test them, Denise did put one bag into her shower with the cover on, and it remained waterproof.

And they look great, attached to my new rear rack. Needless to say, I must have them. Sorry, Tris.

Soon now. Soon they will be mine.

[1] Tris is running a series of WordPress classes in the next few weeks: don’t know WordPress? Need to know WordpPress even better? Check them out.

So I hadn’t tweeted announcements of my Blogathon blog posts for fear of totally spamming the hell out of my Twitter, but everyone else seems to be doing it — and in fact, are surprised that I’m not. So what the heck, let’s do this.

I’m told WordTwit is the “dear Twitter: I posted on my blog” WordPress plugin of choice, and it’s certainly highly rated enough! I hadn’t realized it was codeveloped by fellow Blogathon Vancouver-er Duane Storey, but that just means I can huck something across the room at him if I need help, right?

I definitely like that installing plugins on WordPress is a lot quicker and easier than installing modules on Drupal. The two are apples and oranges, really, but it sure is a pleasant change.

So it’s installed, activated, and now I just have to turn it on. Aaaaand, done. Neat.

One handy feature is that it can optionally use your own server as a URL shorterner service rather than something like bit.ly or TinyURL. Sadly, “catherineomega.com” is not exactly short.

While I was writing this post, Karen Fung brought up a good point: how to include the #blogathon hashtag at the end of the tweet?

Simple: in the Settings panel, you can just set the string, with escape codes for [title] and [link]. (Guess which one does what?)

Just add your hashtags wherever you like.

So the whole thing is pretty pain-free, frankly. Now let’s see if this tweets anyone when I publish it.

Edit: Yes, yes it does.