WordPress Theme Check List/Cheat Sheet

Andrew Marconi — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:06:12 +0000

Stefan Vervoort over at WPToy.com has published a great cheat sheet for developing WordPress themes. It’s available in PDF format, so as he suggests, if you build themes print it out and put it on your wall. When I’m building a WordPress theme, I always forget something along the line (when I go into “programmer mode” I get a little lazy sometimes, alright?) — this makes sure I cover off on all the elements.

Back in 2008, I announced the WordPress Theme Development Checklist on DivitoDesign. The Checklist with many small tips, code snippets and checkpoints you usually forget about was a success.

Today it is time to release an improved official PDF version of the Checklist for the WordPress crowd. This PDF version is clean and easy to print, which makes it an excellent checklist when you are developing your new WordPress Theme.

Great work, Stefan!

[Via WPToy.com]

How to Normalize URLs & Keep Google Happy

Andrew Marconi — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:47:53 +0000

This is something I always (1) forget to do, and (2) forget how to do. Simply add this code (modified for your domain name, of course) to your .htaccess file.

This is important to implement for your search engine ranking. Google, for example, thinks www.domain.com is a different site from domain.com, and this can seriously impact where you rank in Google. There are other ways of doing this, but the below is the only one that doesn’t spit back a 500 error on my server, for some reason.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you want to force ‘www’ on the front end of your URL, switch it up with:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[Via DZone Snippets]

Andrew Marconi » coding

WordPress Theme Check List/Cheat Sheet

How to Normalize URLs & Keep Google Happy