Darice de Cuba

This week-end I spend working on a Wordpress theme for weblog use. My own themes for this weblog are coded for my needs only so they are not apt for public use. I decided to give it a try on coding a theme that met most uses for a simple weblog.

Considering we started a new decade with 2010 I decided to make an old-skool weblog layout with CSS3. So old and new combined. You can see the theme with my own content, I set the cookie for 2 minutes, after that when you refresh you are supposed to see my default design again.

Before I release the theme I still must figure a nice way to display the categories below the latest posts. Also I will be adding a child theme to make it easier to apply your own colors and header image. I’m also planning to add a second child theme sporting a modern design or I might make that another theme on itself.

I know it’s a bit pointless making such basic and simple themes with all the excess free themes available and some excellent commercial theme. But all those themes are so bloated I just want something for basic weblogging, pure content focused without all those plug-ins and social media buttons. And besides one can not practice coding too many times.

More details on the theme I’m working on:

• It’s called “No Graphic” for now because it’s purely CSS styling.
• It uses a lot of CSS3
• Not tested in IE8 yet
• Works well in Mozilla and Webkit
• The navigation menu is dropdown enabled up to 3 levels, but shows as one level
• Uses HTML5 doctype, but coded XHTML for no particular reason
• The comment form still needs some CSS3 love

On another note, I just won the “Digging into Wordpress” PDF book over at Blogging Pro, can’t wait to get my copy! I hope to learn way more about Wordpress and be able to improve my own weblog and the theme I’m working on. I’m a “learn by book” person, I find that books tend to go deeper and clearer on the subject then online articles and tutorials and with a book I can sit anywhere I want until I get an e-book reader that is. That’s why eventually I hope to buy the hard copy of “Digging Into Wordpress”. And also, I plain just love books!

In any case I expect to release this theme this week “as it” and maybe someone will use it or not but this way I can practice and try out things.

I have multi language content on my small freelance/webhosting website running on Wordpress. My target is mainly the Netherlands and secondly Aruba and always open to other offshore projects. I used qtranslate plugin to show both languages on the .com domain. This worked fine but it was time-consuming editing and adding content. Plus it didn’t have a nice url because I chose to use ?lang= instead of using subdomain en. or nl. The only real pro was that it would stay on the same page when switching the language.

Most importantly SEO wise this system wasn’t working, Dutch people use google.nl mostly and because my main language is English I would only get good pagerank in google.com while not even appearing on google.nl with the Dutch content on the same keywords.

A friend of mine advised me to get a .nl domain for the Dutch content and modify Wordpress if needed to serve each domain with the corespondent content. Thanks to the auto system of my registrar(they have my signature on file and everything) I had the .nl domain right away. With PHP codes already floating in my head to mod Wordpress I decided to search again for using Wordpress with multiple domains. That’s when I came across WPML.

WPML is a very extensive plugin that easily lets you transform your website in multiple language without breaking a sweat. And most importantly it supports having different domain for each language.

It has it’s own tags to add the navigation menu but it can handle Wordpress own navigation tag. I didn’t change my navigation tag and it switches language just fine. I had a breadcrumbs plugin but that one broke down with WPML which wasn’t an issue as WPML has its own breadcrumb function that works like a charm.

In less then two hours I had my freelance site reorganized using WPML and two domains for each language. The only thing requiring some work is the Language Switcher. It’s pretty ugly out of the box. I edited the core .php file and also changed the flag images. I used FamFamFam’s flags which are the nicest free icons I know off.

Although since I installed WPML they have updated it and made it easier to edit the language switcher through CSS. I haven’t try it that way yet as I just redid the PHP file and re-uploaded the flag icons after the plugin update.

As for the Google Dutch results I’m still waiting for Google to re-index my site as it still returns the old url’s on the English Google, so the Dutch domain hasn’t been indexed yet. Patience is the key here.

But I’m really happy with WPML and can’t wait to get more purposes to use it more extensively and beyond just for serving multiple languages.