so my plan for today, assuming I find the time, is to clean this up per above… and then add some additional page templates for things like 404, search, etc…  kind of want to finalize db changes as much as I can to make it easier for multiple folks to work it…

oh, btw, I cant seem to get the contact form to work either…  and never really been a fan of the current one…  so think I might swap it out for contact form 7 which works very wel…  any issues there?

oh and if successful, may be able to get this into svn today…

btw…. you title function doesnt work for me…  always returns the blog name…  think thats because I have wp installed in a subdir… will take a look at it..

Twitter widget

Didn't add my thoughts on this which I meant to do. I'm a fan of Twitter, I use it a lot (which now you follow me Steve you're probably well aware!). I also have a Twitter account for my website which currently has nearly 700 followers.

I currently use the Twitter widget on Techie Talk, but I'm starting to question why. I don't see what value it holds for visitors to the site other than to inform them that there is a Twitter feed. But I do that elswhere on the site anyway.

If I remove it I can speed up the load time because it doesn't have to poll Twitter to populate the widget on each page load. I'm just in the process of finding something to “fill the gap” that will be created by removing it then it's gone.

You may feel that having the widget on SimplePress adds value, for me on my site I don't think it does. Especially considering the peformace gain I should get by removing it.

probably not using a good twitter tool… ours caches the twitter feed… only updates it every hour offline… so page loads dont have to go to twitter…

okay, a look at what I have done with the menus… that new menu system in 3.0 is pretty cool, but once done not likely to touch again…

first is base view… 2nd and third show the two menu items with dropdowns…

Okay…  I have committed the initial SP2010 theme work to svn… so now it can be tagged teamed or looked at live…  a couple of important notes:

the svn repo is at:  http://svn.simple-press.com/site-theme/SP2010

It requires WP 3.0 and the addition of the following two plugins:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

You will also need the latest version of the iThemes Builder theme.  I have version 2.4.4.  I have made ZERO changes to this parent theme.  As they make improvements we should be able to udpate at will since my theme is a child theme.  as such, Builder is not part of svn repo.

all of the formerly included content files are now included in the actual page content EXCEPT for the showcase include file for each site. I liked the way it worked, so left it alone.  these php files are now part of the theme. So all page content, widget changes, etc, should all be done from the wp admin now. 

because of the page content and all the builder configurations, you will need a db to import in order to be able to actually see this theme in action.  Andy, I will email you the db – Luffer let me know if you want it.  Its originally from this live site though dated.  By using settings in wp-config.php there are no additional db changes need for it to work on your site.

Worth noting the home link in the menu is hardcoded to the live site.  be careful using it.  this is due to the new wp 3.0 menu system not having a built in home link ability without hardcoded url (there is open ticket on this).

We should refrain from changing the actual page content very much.  Yes, there are changes needed.  But, when we change the page content or the widgets or stuff from the wp admin, we will need to exchange db updates again.  So at some point we need to do the changes (like the text on the front page), we just need to coordinate the page content changes – either thru db exchanges or page content/widget exchanges…

Same goes for any builder configuation settings.  we will need to either exchange the settings or db mods…

of course, if you want to just get me all the changes needed, I am happy to maintain the 'real' page content and db settings…  we can just svn commit and theme file changes…

oh and the title generation routine is in the functions.php but doesnt work for me – no time to look into… likely because I run WP in a subdir…

btw James… after playing, agreed whole heartedly on the sidebar stuff…  all pages back to two on the right except forum with one on the right…  think it looks much better too…