Cozmoslabs » Wordpress

Multilingual Wordpress – WPML Plugin Review

Cristian — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:41:51 +0000

One of the hardest things to do with Wordpress is creating a multilingual blog / website that is easy to maintain and develop.

My interest on the subject comes from the need of my customers for easy to maintain multilingual websites. This way they can extend their services to new markets.

I’ve had this discussion in the past, with a description of various plugins and methods to develop a multilingual Wordpress blog / site.

In that article I’ve talked about the theory behind multilingual web-developement and mostly about the multilingual Wordpress and four ways of implementing it:

The “Two-Tree” concept ( we use “language” categories )
Automated translation (using google languages or babelfish)
Manual translation using plugins ( I could only find one really good plugin that can do that so we’ll look into that)
Semi-automated payed translation. (this is rather an ingenious concept and I believe the people who created the service will have a lot to gain from it)

Today we’ll talk about a new and really interesting Wordpress multilingual plugin: WPML.

The interesting thing about this multilingual plugin is the way it organizes the information. It’s completely different from qTranslate (that I presented in the previous multilingual blog post). Instead of using language tags (that separates the content in different languages), MPLM links one post in English to another post that will represent it’s translation in Spanish for example. This way you get to translate everything in a very clean way.

Beside this, there are more really cool features that help you get a complete translation done, like:

Theme localization – Provide translation for texts that appear in your theme.
Professional translation – an optional service, built for people who want to have their site’s contents professionally translated.
Navigation – Control the appearance of site-wide navigation based on WordPress pages.
Sticky links – This is an essential function for running full websites with WordPress. It guarantees that links between pages can never break.
Home page link – All themes have links to the home page. This function will make that home page link point to the correct language.
Hard coded theme links – Many themes include hard-coded links. This will make these links language dependent so that the link text and the target match the display language.

The Tutorial – Building a multilingual website from scratch with Wordpress

The best way to showcase the functionality of this plugin is creating a tutorial in which we’ll create our very own multilingual website.

For this I’ve installed a new Wordpress blog here, installed our plugin (you can download and install it from here) and the Thematic theme ( because I do like it a lot! )

So far so good. Next we’ll need to add some content to our new website. This is going to be a site about a fictional company called “Lettuce INC.” that produces 100% natural lettuce (Lactuca sativa).

We’ll have four pages: Home, About, Blog and Contact. Also we’ve selected the Home page to be a static one (as opposed to displaying our latest posts). You can do this from the admin panel, just go under Settings → Reading.

The available languages will be English and Romanian.

Setting up WPML, the multilingual plugin for Wordpress

Before we can start translating anything we need to tell WPML what languages we’ll have on our site. So head over in the Wordpress admin and select WPLM → Languages.

The next step lets us select the secondary languages for our site. I’ve selected Romanian.

The third and final step to activating WPML consists of adding a language switched. This way the visitors will be able to easily select their preferred language. While available in the form of a widget, it’s also possible to insert it directly into the theme using the icl_post_languages() function, but this is outside the scope of the current tutorial.

Translating our content

Now that we’ve set up the plugin we can finally start translating our content.

We’ll start by translating the pages of our blog. To do so simply go to the edit pages admin panel in Wordpress and there, we have a small “+” button that lets us translate individual pages.

This will create a new page for us where we can add the translated title, content, custom fields (if any) and basically anything needed for your page.

Another way of generating the same result would be to open (or create a new page for that matter) any page and on the right side, above the Publishing box, we have the language box.

Translating the blog

Similar to the pages we can translate blog posts.

Also we can translate categories and tags. This is a really useful functionality that in my opinion makes this plugin complete.
To do so we’ll go to the category page in the Wordpress admin panel and click on the category that you want to translate. Then scroll to the bottom and in the Language box click “Add translation”.

Translating various strings in Wordpress like blog title, blog description or widgets

Our next stop is the String Translation under the WPML tab.

You might want to “Save settings and rescan strings” first, just in case.

An interesting functionality here is the possibility to import/export .po files. The way this works is you export the English strings in .po format, insert them into PoEdit to translate them, export the Romanian .po files from PoEdit and then Import the translated file into WPML… Confused? Don’t worry… the only reason you might use this is if you need to hire someone else to translate your site but you don’t want to give them access to the Wordpress backed to do the translation!

Theme translation

The only thing left for us now is to translate our theme.

There are two way of doing this:

Translate the theme by WPML.
WPML will add the theme’s texts to the string translation page, where you can enter translations.
Using a .mo file in the theme directory.
Include the theme’s .mo files in the theme’s folder and WPML will load the right file for each language.

Both are good ways… I’ve mentioned in the beginning that I’ve chosen Thematic for a reason and that reason is that it’s localized in a lot of languages… 13 to be exact (lucky number ). This means if your needed language is between those 13 then you don’t have to translate your theme.

Conclusions

What I like

It’s the first and only really complete multilingual plugin for Wordpress
You can easily translate any page, post, widget, theme text, blog string, plugin, etc.
Professional translation. This is how the WPML team makes money! They offer the possibility to automatically translate your blog without touching a single string. This is done by real translators (no robots at the end of the line) so you get really good quality .
Comments translation. So if you really want to take your multilingual blog to the next level then comments translation is the way to go.

What I didn’t like

Ok… Call me picky… but PLEASE transform the “Advanced »” link into a BIG BUTTON in the Languages Section in WPML. I’ve searched for something like 2 hours for it. I thought it was removed or something in the latest version! I mean that’s where all the good stuff is, like selecting the URL format and admin language!
The information on the WPML.org website is… terribly unorganized… there is a lot of good info there, just that it’s all over the place. There is a really informative forum… but there is no link to the forum in the main menu! You have to click the main support page and there you have a link to the forum. Not user friendly at all.

Final thoughts

The WPML plugin is genius! It’s the best multilingual plugin for Wordpress there is. As you could see the only things that I didn’t like were simple UI issues! But the core of the plugin is rock solid and the functionality it provides it’s just unprecedented! I wish the WPML team best of luck and congratulations for this really, really good multilingual plugin for Wordpress! Keep up the good work!

Members: WordPress Plugin by Justin Tadlock

Cristian — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:41:50 +0000

Justin Tadlock has done it again. This time he released to the Wordpress community a user, role, and content management plugin called Members.

Its purpose is to make WordPress a more powerful CMS by giving you fine-grain control over the users of your site.

So what dose this plugin do:

Edit Roles: Edit your user roles and their capabilities.
New Roles: Create new roles for use on your site.
Content Permissions: Adds a meta box on your write post/page editor that allows you to restrict content to specific roles.
Widgets: Adds a login form widget and user-listing widget that you can use in any widget area on your site.
Shortcodes: Creates shortcodes that you can use to restrict or allow access to certain parts of your posts and pages (or any other shortcode-capable area).
Template Tags: New functions for use within your WordPress theme for various things.
Private Blog: Allows you to create a private blog that can only be accessed by users that are logged in (redirects them to the login page).

I personally can’t wait for future developments of this plugin. It takes Wordpress one step closer to full user management without having to code it your self

Add “Featured Posts” to your Thematic child theme

Cristian — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:35:54 +0000

Wordpress as a social platform

Cristian — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:46:22 +0000

Wordpress as a social platform

WordPress started in 2003. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. But you already knew that!

By itself this blogging tool used to be just that: a way to put your thoughts out there, so anyone with a internet connection could read it. But Wordpress is not just about blogging, at least not anymore. While still limited in terms of “out of the box” functionality compared with other CMS out there, Wordpress managed to shine thought it’s plugins and themes.

Right now Wordpress can be a forum, multi blogs platform, social media platform, microblog, social bookmarking and these are just a few of the possibilities.

Wordpress is slowly making it’s way into the corporate world as well: Yahoo, CNN, New York Times, Ford, Nike are just a few of big names that implemented it for it’s ease of use, fast development times, cost reduction and easy maintenance of the platform. Oh… and U.S. Government Agencies are also using WordPress.

So where do we go from here? Recently it was announced Wordpress to merge with Wordpress MU. This will probably appear with the 3.0 launch. This seams to be just one of the big steps towards a social web platform. The next step will probably be to integrate more social media features from BuddyPress.

The power of a blog is in its network of users. Since web users are becoming accustomed to a culture of participation, publishers will look to include tools that will better facilitate the conversation. Tools like user profile pages and groups from BuddyPress will make a good additions to blogs. An issue could be the “yet another account and password” problem but solutions like oAuth or using accounts from other more prestigious social networks (login in with your facebook or google account) will help the transition from simple comments to complex communication.

While all these extra features mean nothing for end users that just wants to blog (and for which the Wordpress was created initially) they will mean the world for power bloggers, web-developers and web entrepreneurs by transforming expensive and time consuming activities into cheap and fast ones. Implementing ideas, interconnecting social networks, creating learning platforms, building multilingual information hubs, using community feedback to build a better business, all this will get easier to implement (for the web-developer) and use (for the end user).

Another interesting thing happening in the Wordpress community is the adoption of GPL licensing for payed theme clubs that previously used proprietary licenses. In my opinion, this is because Matt Mullenweg started to pressure non-GPL theme clubs and designers. He did this by voicing his opinion, removing all non-GPL themes and theme designers that have even the slightest contact with non-GPL themes from the Theme Repository and by making it easy to install themes directly from the backend of Wordpress. While this can be debated indefinitely one thing is sure: it’s good for the end user and the community! For Wordpress as a platform this is even better since most of these themes are good quality and people can now reuse the professionally developed code in future projects without the fear of legal repercussions.

Wordpress definitely has the opportunity to become a great social platform. The same way blogging changed the publishing world it’s fair to say that social networking will change the blogging platform to facilitate communication and collaboration. It’s appropriate.

Street Wordpress Theme

Cristian — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Street is something that was created from a spark of inspiration, something that I felt should look like this. This wasn’t thought out nor planed.

It uses the beautiful Vegur Free Font for the headings and main menu, implemented by Cufon (text replacement technique). I’ve spent a great deal of time searching for the perfect free font for this theme, but I think I found the right combination.

While this child theme is just a skin for Thematic, because this exact reason is also functional. You have access to all 13 Widget Areas Thematic uses, the semantically correct HTML that is great for SEO, can use a page template that spans the entire width of the page without the sidebars and even you can upload your own logo or header image from the “Street Theme Options”.

An elegant Child Theme for Thematic

I hope you’ll enjoy using this theme as much I enjoyed creating it!

In order to install it you have to download the Thematic Theme (from which this child theme inherits all of the functionality), upload both themes (Street and Thematic) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the Street theme.

Future Child Themes for Thematic in the works

Cristian — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:18:55 +0000

Spring is at it’s end and makes room for a promising Summer. Finishing the new design was a fulfilling moment for me. When you put so much effort into something, your personal expectations are always high. Building something for myself and things are prone to be problematic. In the initial stages nothing really feels right and nothing is good enough.

But now that the new design is live I’m happy I’ve changed it and with it behind me I can start focusing on other projects.

For the near future I want to release two new child themes for Thematic, one of which might even be released as a stand alone theme also, for inclusion into the Wordpress Theme Repository.

The first theme to be released will be my design for Cozmoslabs. I still have to clear it up since it’s full of hacks.

The second theme is an artsy-grunge kind of theme. The design is almost done so I only have to implement it as a child theme. Here are some screen shots.
Feedback is always welcomed.

Multilingual solutions for a wordpress installation

Cristian — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:51:33 +0000

Photo by mykreeve

From my point of view the internet has became a really crowded place. No more “build it and they will come” mentality. Today’s internet business have started to compete for every single user and the need to address all potential users is more important then ever.

This is where multilingual web-sites and web-applications come into place. Limiting your business to a single language or expanding it to target users from all over the world could mean the difference between failure and success.

The big players on the internet seem to get this. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many more offer they services in numerous languages. The introduction of tools like Google Language Tools, Yahoo! Babel Fish and similar ones have opened the multilingual doors for the masses. You can now view an entire web-page in your native language at the click of the mouse.

However things are not quite there! Even though the automated translation of a web-site is acceptable for getting a general idea of the content, mistakes are common and things can and are misinterpreted between languages.

The theory behind multilingual web-design

Implementing a static HTML web-site in multiple languages is quite simple. Just duplicate the content in a /lang1/ folder and translate the content. For web-sites that don’t need to be updated very often this a rather good solution, giving you a lot of flexibility. This type of multilingual implementation has been around from the birth of the internet.

With the appearance of dynamic web-site things started to get complicated. Content became separated from HTML to some extent and databases transformed the way we store data. To translate every piece of information in a modern web-site, things just had to be implemented differently. The old way of copy and paste in a different folder is no longer an option. Extra work needed to manage two, three or even more dynamic systems (one for each language) just isn’t justified. As a result complex implementations of the solution transformed the way we think about multilingual web-sites.

Multilingual Wordpress

There are quite a few options out there for Wordpress users to translate the content of their blogs or web-pages. I’ll first make a list of the different implementations and them try and talk more about each one in particular.

The “Two-Tree” concept ( we use “language” categories )
Automated translation (using google languages or babelfish)
Manual translation using plugins ( I could only find one really good plugin that can do that so we’ll look into that)
Semi-automated payed translation. (this is rather an ingenious concept and I believe the people who created the service will have a lot to gain from it)

All these solutions have both advantages and disadvantages. From my experience a multilingual web-site is an added complication with absolutely no easy way out. There are just so many things that could go wrong: encoding, special characters, the content to maintain increases with every extra lanuage, not everything can be easily translated (anything other then the post body and title needs extra steps to translate), communication between the site admin and the translators introduces a lot of undesired lag into the project and let’s not forget the big bill from a professional translator.

But as I said in the beginning all this effort could be well worth. Even if you are promoting a service or product that is difficult to ship / commercialize / support abroad the extra traffic alone could be worth a lot. A few trackbacks could significantly improve your google ranking in search that would in turn bring you even more traffic. The way business is done on the internet is that of a Three Way Market and every bit of extra traffic helps.

1. The “Two-Tree” concept

This is the “old” way to do it. This does not imply “old-fashioned” as if this is an inferior way to the new possibility! It just fits another purpose.

Both lang1 and lang2 web-sites are part of the same wordpress installation.

First you would need to create two pages: en and ro. Then create the rest of the pages for every other page you want. Our en page will be the home page for English and ro will be the home page for Romanian. When we create a new page, for example the Contact page, will select the page parent to be en. Repeat this for every page and language and by no time you’ll have a proper multilingual structure!

The listing in the edit pages tab inside wordpress would look something like this:

Next we’ll implement a similar structure for our categories. Two “en” and “ro” categories will hold out translated posts. A custom made theme would be required to display the right menus and content for each language in particular.

This might not be a really efficient way to translate one’s web-blog but it dosen’t require any plugins. Is quite SEO friendly but unless you make serious changes to the way your theme manages the menus it won’t be user friendly.

2. Automated translation (using google languages or babelfish)

This is one type of translation that is just great for blogs. It’s really simple to use, free, fast to implement (don’t have to send anything to a translator). Chances are your non English users will use these services directly from Google or Yahoo so this saves them quite a few clicks which is always a good thing.

The obvious disadvantage is the quality of the translation. By no means this should be used for a respectable business. While one can understand the meaning and general feeling of the article, even the smallest misspell in the initial language will render this service useless, there are grammar mistakes and the words are not always translated in their intended meaning (based on context).

There are quite a few plugins available for wordpress that automatically translate your content but the one I used and recommend is Global Translator.

With Global Translator plugin for Wordpress one can:

translate the blog in 34 languages
provide the translations by using Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt or FreeTranslations.com
use the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost
use the built in Fast Caching System. Drastically reduction of the risk of temporarily ban from translation engines.
you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar

As you can see you can do a lot with Global Translator. It also translates the front-end Wordpress interface (words like Posts, Pages, Read More, etc). Again my recommendation is to use this plugin for your blog if you are trying to reach a larger audience but try and don’t use it for large web-sites unless you know what you are doing (due to the quality of the translation).

3. Manual translation using plugins

Translating your wordpress installation to the last word could be a really hard thing to do, especially for non-technical wordpress users. Although a blog has a really straight forward structure and dosen’t pose so many problems, developing a multilingual web-site using wordpress is a different story all together. A web-site can have different widgets on different pages, might use plugins that have an front-end interface that is not translatable and will need to have at least a contact form that will be available in several languages.

Solutions? One thing is certain: it’s not impossible . Although it might be somewhat unintuitive at first one can create a fully translated web-site (for a blog this is quite easy to do).

By unintuitive I mean users might have to use tags for widget translation and even template changes in order to get the entire web-site translated.

However there are good new. The latest version of the qTranslate plugin has a really easy to use interface when translating post and pages. They offer One-Click-Switching between the languages. One can change the language as easy as switching between Visual and HTML editors!

Here are a few screen-shots of the plugin:

Other options that make qTranslate such a great plugin includes:

No more for adding special characters or strings to separate your multilingual texts! – qTranslate will handle them almost everywhere for you
No need to edit the plugin file to get your language working! – Use the comfortable and intuitive Configuration Page
Comes with many languages already built in! – English, German, Simplified Chinese and a lot of others
Add your language in seconds! – Thanks to the simplistic Configuration Page
Multilingual dates out of the box – Translates dates and time for you.
Improved Installation! – No need to manually search and upload Gettext Databases/.mo files anymore
Multilingual Text in Templates without the need to change Gettext Databases/.mo files – Use Language Tags with Gettext!
Choose one of 3 Modes to make your URLs pretty and SEO-friendly. – The everywhere compatible ?lang=en, simple and beautiful /en/foo/ or nice and neat en.yoursite.com
One language per URL – Users and SEO will thank you for not mixing content.

From all these options a few are really useful, particularly the SEO-friendly URLs and the automatic download of Gettext Database/.mo files that you should have otherwise downloaded then and then uploaded them to your Wordpress installation.

There is a really useful forum available in case you need help with the plugin or have suggestions. Qian Qin ( the author ) responds fast to enquirers and there’s quite a big community around it.

4.Semi-automated payed translation

This is a intriguing idea. You install the Icanlocalize plugin and then:

Their system fetches posts and pages that require translation (new or updated).
Professional translators do the translation. The translation retains all formating, embedded objects, links, etc.
Translation is saved on WordPress. It can be saved on the original blog or on an independent blog.
Comments are moderated in your own language. You can reply in your language and they’ll translate it instantly.

Sound good right? But wait there’s even more! You can even have a Multi-lingual contact form, where your visitors can contact you in their language and you can respond in your language.

If you have the cash to invest in a ongoing translation of your articles in different languages this plugin is for you. I haven’t personally tested their system and don’t know what is the quality of the translation (they are using payed translators so by all means it will be incomparable better then a automated translation).

The pricing is… well… compared to Romanian translators, expensive. They have a quote for text translation so you can paste your text and receive a instant price. For a word count of 470 I received a cost to translate per language of 32.9 USD. This means that for a larger article you could end up paying over 100$ per/language/article. If this is a good price for you then this service is the way to go!

Conclusions

Multilingual web-sites are the least an annoyance and can transform in a nightmare if you try to rush things up ( I think I lost an entire day on a past project because two persons worked on it with two different editors and different encoding and every special character was displayed as question mark or a square! ).

Luckily open source has evolved quite a lot in the past years and now we can make use of out of the box solutions that really make your life easy. Even if more powerful CMS’s like Joomla! or Drupal have advanced multilingual solutions, Wordpress is not far behind and I hope this article can bring the reader a bit closer to solving it’s multilingual problems.

Also don’t forget if you ever need a localized theme for your project Thematic is that theme (currently translated in 7 languages)!

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with iCanLocalize.com and do not receive commissions on sales.

Replacing the Thematic Menu with a DropDown List of Categories

Cristian — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:27:54 +0000

There comes a time when you might want to use the Thematic Theme for other things then just a blog, like a magazine or a portal and it might be best suited to have the categories of your blog on top instead of your static pages. After all, you’ll probably have two static pages (about and contact) and several categories and subcategories.

I’ve seen this request twice in the forums over at ThemeShaper and I’ll now try and answer it.

I’ve created a the CatDrop Child Theme that dose just that: transforms Thematic’s menu into a magazine style category based one!

In order to install it you have to download the Thematic Theme (from which this child theme inherits all of the functionality), upload both themes (CatDrop and Thematic) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the CatDrop theme.

Assuming you’ve already downloaded the latest version ofThematic (at the time of the writing it was version 0.7) and uploaded it inside your wp-content/themes directory, we can start the tutorial.

We won’t modify Thematic directly, instead we’ll create a Child theme and add this functionality to it. To do just that create a directory named catdrop inside your themes folder and two files: functions.php and style.css.

We’ll start by telling Wordpress that our theme is a ChildTheme of thematic add this code into style.css.

/*
Theme Name: CatDrop
Theme URI: http://cozmoslabs.com/
Description: Built on Thematic Theme
Author: Cristi Antohe
Author URI: http://cozmoslabs.com/
Template: thematic
Version: 0.1
.
This work, like WordPress, is released under GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL).

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html

.
*/

/* Reset browser defaults */
@import url('../thematic/library/styles/reset.css');

/* Apply basic typography styles */
@import url('../thematic/library/styles/typography.css');

/* Apply a basic layout */
@import url('../thematic/library/layouts/2c-r-fixed.css');

/* Apply basic image styles */
@import url('../thematic/library/styles/images.css');

/* Apply default theme styles and colors */
@import url('../thematic/library/styles/default.css');

/* Prepare theme for plugins */
@import url('../thematic/library/styles/plugins.css');

/************************************************ Style for drop-down menu */
#header{
	z-index:99; /* IE7 z-index bug */
}
#access{
	overflow:visible;
	position:static;
	float:none;
	height:37px;
}
#menu{
	position:static;
	width: 940px;
	margin-top: 0pt;
	margin-right: auto;
	margin-bottom: 0pt;
	margin-left: auto;

	padding-top: 7px;
	padding-right: 0pt;
	padding-bottom: 8px;
	padding-left: 0pt;
	overflow-x: visible;
	overflow-y: visible;
	overflow:visible;
}
#menu ul{
	padding:0;
	margin:0;
}
#menu ul li ul{

}
#menu li{
	margin:0;
	padding:0;
}
#menu li a{
	text-align:center;
	margin:0 0px 0 0;
	width:11em;
	padding:5px;
	border-left:1px solid #6DA5D6;
}
#menu li li li a{
	background:#B5D1EA;
}
#main{
	clear:both;
}

I’ve added some stilling to the #access and #menu divs or the theme would look odd.

Next we need to create our functions.php file. Add the following code to it:




	Home
 	cat_ID) != "") {
 		echo "";
			wp_list_categories('orderby=id&amp;show_count=0&amp;title_li=&amp;use_desc_for_title=1&amp;child_of='.$this_category->cat_ID);
 		echo "";
 	}
	?>

The categ_menu function is the one that generates the list of categories and the add_to_head one is adding the needed css and javascript files to out Child Theme.(you can get the files from the Child theme download). This could be easily modified to support drop-down pages for the menu but that one some other time!

And this is the way you make Thematic similar to a magazine style Wordpress theme!

Installing Wordpress Child Themes and Customizing the Byty Theme

Cristian — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:25:16 +0000

Source byty.ro

Since I’ve launched by first Wordpress Child Theme based on Thematic I thought writing about how you can make small changes to the theme and put your own graphical logo, add css for other plugins, basically create a customized version of it.

This post is divided in 4 different parts, particularly:

Installing Wordpress Child Themes
Adding your Own Logo
Adding a standard top ad banner to your page
Creating css to style plugins that do not display perfectly on your theme

1. Installing Wordpress Child Themes

Wordpress Child Themes are a new concept introduced not a long time ago that allow you to inherit all of the functionality of a parent theme and overwrite the css style, change the images and some parts of the html through the use of functions.php file. We won’t go in a lot of detail on how to create a Child Theme here, but if you are interested and want to find out more please have a look here, here and here.

To get started you need to Download the Thematic Theme (this is the parent theme), then Download the Byty Child Theme.

Once this is out of the way you have to upload both of the themes to your server in the /themes folder, just like you would do with any other theme. After the parent and child theme have been uploaded you can now activate the child theme (you don’t have to setup anything for the parent theme).

This is it! Now you know how to install a Wordpress Child Theme. Easy isn’t it!

2. Adding your own logo

I’ve designed the Byty Child Theme to be easy to customize. With this in mind you can add your own logo in no time through the use of CSS.

First thing you need to do is to make sure that your logo is 205px by 60px or something similar. You need to upload the logo into the wp-content/themes/byty/images folder.

Next open wp-content/themes/byty/styles.css file and find the #blog-title and #blog-title a declarations.

In the #blog-title declaration remove the comments (/* this is a css comment */ ) from background:url(images/logo.gif) 0px 63px no-repeat; and replace logo.gif with your own personal logo.

In the #blog-title a declaration remove the comments from filter:alpha(opacity=0); -moz-opacity: 0; opacity:0;. This will make the title of your blog transparent, basically hiding it and letting the logo to be displayed in the back. This is good from an accessibility point of view since if you disable the CSS you can still see the text from your Blog Title.

In the end this is how that particular piece of css should look like:

#blog-title{
background:url(images/my_personal_logo.gif) 0px 63px no-repeat;
width:205px;
height:84px;
text-indent:0px;
padding:0px;
padding-top:60px;
border:none;
}
#blog-title a{
display:block;
height:60px;
font-size:60px;
color:#2772b3;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS";
font-weight:normal;
filter:alpha(opacity=0);
-moz-opacity: 0;
opacity:0;
}

If everything is in order, once you reload your page you should see the logo displayed on top of the Child Theme.

3. Adding a standard top ad banner to your page

For this we’ll use the functions.php file that comes with the Byty Child Theme.

Once you open that file you’ll see the flowing code:

In place of < ! -- Please add a 728px by 90px Standard Banner -- > you can add your own Google Adsense ad or leave it unchanged if you don’t what Ads on your site. You can add more ads to your site in the sidebars or in the content of your site through the use of text widgets.

4. Creating css to style plugins that do not display perfectly on your theme

If you have a plugin that isn’t displaying perfectly with the Byty Child Theme I recommend you open wp-content/themes/byty/extra.css and add any other css that you might need in there. This way you have separated files for the theme and your plugins.

As you can see there isn’t that much to say about this and I hope I’ve been clear with my explications.

If you’ve customized or used the Byty Child Theme please let me know! I’m interested to see for what you are using it!

Byty the Free Child Theme – Built on Thematic

Cristian — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:28:04 +0000

This is my first Free to Download Child Theme. It was built for a friend of mine and we decided to release it for free in hope of some extra publicity .

In order to install it you have to download the Thematic Theme (from which this child theme inherits all of the functionality), upload both themes (Byty and Thematic) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the Byty theme.

To make matters short here is a screen shot:

Over the next week I’ll post small tips and tutorials about how to customize this theme in order to remove/change the top ad, style plugins that are not normally supported, etc.

If you have questions don’t hesitate to ask!

Blogs that are using this theme

If you are using this Child Theme leave a comment and I’ll add you to this list

Byty has been updated to the latest version of Thematic (0.9) and will not work with older versions!