THE PENDING DRAFT

Not long ago i didn’t have any plan how conditional statements in WordPress Themes work. I used them, even quite often to be honest. But it was mostly hacked together from different code snippets or other themes and if something didn’t work the way i wanted it was a very tedious task to find out whats wrong because i just didn’t get it.

But in the end, it’s not that complicated as it may look. So, let me try to explain how they work in simple terms.

What’s a Conditional Tag?

A conditional statement checks for a certain “condition” and outputs something if this condition is true. For example you have a function which outputs something, but you only want it on the front-page, or you want to have a different output on the front-page than you have on other pages. You can also check for way more complicated stuff, but for the sake of sanity let’s stick to an easy example. Show something, but only on the front page.

Luckily, there are lots of predefined conditional statements provided by WordPress. We use ‘<?php is_home();’ which we wrap up in a simple if/else statement to check if we are on the home page.

<?php
    if (is_home() ) {
        // OUTPUT ON THE HOME PAGE
    } else {
        // OUTPUT ON ANY OTHER PAGE
    }
?>

Some conditionals work just like that (like is_home), others accept optional parameters (e.g. is_single) and some even require parameters in order to work.

To check if we are on a single Post, Attachment or Custom Post Type page (basically everything which uses the single.php Template) we can simply use:

<?php
    if (is_single() ) {
        // OUTPUT ON SINGLE POST PAGES
    } else {
        // OUTPUT ON ANY OTHER PAGE
    }
?>

But maybe we wanna target just the post titled “Our super special Post”, that’s possible too.

<?php
    if (is_single( 'Our super special Post' ) ) {
        // OUTPUT ON OUR SUPER SPECIAL POST PAGE
    } else {
        // OUTPUT ON ANY OTHER PAGE
    }
?>

Of course you can also use if/else/elseif to check multiple things at the same time. So, to finish this little introduction, let’s combine all of the above in one sentence:

<?php
    if (is_home() ) {
        // OUTPUT ON THE HOME PAGE
    } elseif (is_single( 'Our super special Post' ) ) {
        // OUTPUT ON OUR SUPER SPECIAL POST PAGE
    } elseif (is_single() ) {
        // OUTPUT ON ANY OTHER SINGLE POST PAGE
    } else {
        // OUTPUT ON ANY OTHER PAGE
    }
?>

As said before, there are plenty of conditionals ready to be used, browse the Conditionals in the WP Codex to find out how to use them or if they accept/require parameters etc. Once you understood how they work, you can do really cool stuff with them.

Use the comments, if you’ve got any questions or if i missed something.

When I started my quest, my goal was not to apply for an engineering job at Facebook. I wanted to broaden my horizon as a journalist, unlock new possibilities and simply learn something new. That’s why I will state confidently: It was worth the effort. Learning how to code is rewarding, I recommend doing it. At the same time, my answer to whether journalists should be able to code has become more nuanced. More on that later.

David Bauer is a swiss journalist who set his goal for 2012 to “Learn to code in a year” with CodeYear. It is debatable if and why a journalist needs to know coding at all but i think he makes some pretty good and reasonable points about that at the end.

I just started some JavaScript lessons in CodeAcademy some weeks ago and it is inspiring and motivating to see how someone was able to go from zero to build something like Instacurate in just about a year. Congratulations and thank’s for your insights David Bauer.

How I Learnt to Code in One Year David Bauer. Journalist+.

If you’re like me, you normally have tons of windows open while working. This leads to a lot of clicking back and forth, rearranging your windows. Yesterday i found this little helper called “moom – Move and zoom windows”.

Once installed you get a nice little pop-up when you hover over the green zoom button. Now you can zoom not only to full screen, but also to the left, right, top or bottom half of your monitor. Very handy.

And if this isn’t enough you can also activate a little grid view to exactly choose the region of your screen where you want your window. Simple but extremely timesaving. There are many other features and settings to configure it even more.

You can download a demo version which gives you 100 “moom’s” and the full version is 10$. Money well spent if you ask me.

Go try it for yourself!

This is fundamentally different from general commerce and normal software licenses. And when you try to apply general commerce principles to GPL products, things get messed up in a hurry. The whole revenue model and philosophy of cost-per-item simply doesn’t work under GPL because the product itself is free. In place of the product being the commodity, it is the service that is sold.

If you work with WordPress and were not living under a rock for the past week, you’ve heard of the “GPL-War” going on between Envato authors and the WordPress Foundation. It all started (again) with Jake Caputo being banned from speaking at a WordCamp because he sells his themes on envato’s Themeforest, which isn’t fully GPL-compatible. Lots have been written about it, WPdaily did a good job in covering the whole story and opinions from different angles.

In this article on Design is Philosophy Morten Rand-Hendriksen raises the questions about who owns WordPress and how one can still earn money in a GPL-World. It’s all about services instead of licenses. Worth a read!

Who owns WordPress? or How to Make Money in a GPL Universe. – Design is Philosophy.

Since mobile devices are booming, screen real estate is becoming more of an issue again. One very effective solution is to move things like navigation menus out of the visible canvas and back in when used.

I have yet to get my head around possible techniques, so i compiled a little reading list with some recommendable tutorials, examples and resources.

The most comprehensive article on this list is from David Bushell for Smashing Magazine. If you only read one article about this topic, make it this one! He covers the whole process of building a fully responsive Off-Canvas Menu, which also works without Javascript. Furthermore, he gives us some great insights into performance issues when using jQuery and why he recommends using CSS Transitions instead.
Smashing Magazine – Implementing Off-Canvas Navigation For A Responsive Website

Luke Wroblewski, author of the Mobile First book, was maybe one of the first to mention Off-Canvas Navigation. In this artictle he covers many different concepts and ideas for Multi Device Layouts including the Off-Canvas approach.
Multi Device Layout Patterns

Inspired from Luke Wroblewski, Jason Weaver developed a very nice demo page for an Off-Canvas Menu. You can also find this Demo on github to fork it and play around with it.
Off Canvas – A Multi-Device Web Layout Pattern
Off Canvas Demo by Jason Weaver on github

A german article with some very good examples of Off-Canvas Menus in practice. Worth checking out, even if you don’t speak german. They’re also using this technique heavily in their own Tatami Theme.
Elmastudio – Showcase: Off Canvas in responsive Webdesigns (German)

Another one in german with a nice overview of the technique and the idea behind it.
Elmastudio – Off Canvas-Layouts in responsive Webdesigns

I know, a list like this can never be complete, so please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.