I was rummaging through old blog posts and came across my very first post, ever. Granted, it’s not the first post from this blog, or even any blog that’s “live”, but it’s still a decent post. It started way back when, and goes a little somethin’ like this:

So… what is a relationship?

Simply put, in the traditional sense, two people getting along with each other well enough to be with each other exclusively. That sounds great… in a movie maybe, and one that doesn’t star Sandra Bullock.

There’s all kinds of stuff that can happen to them once they start – simply fade away, things get bad, people grow apart, someone better comes along, people change, sometimes for the worse… that’s life, either you can deal with it or get rid of it, that all depends on the situation you’re faced with, hooray for particulars.

I’ve been in a few relationships in my day, some good, some not so good. They start, they’re great – the coined phrase everyone’s using these days is the honeymoon period, which is nothing more than you simply not knowing the person yet, and filling in the gaps with what you think you see, and hoping for the best. Depending on how distorted you are when facing reality? You’ll either be very surprised, very disappointed, or somewhere in between when that period is over. Fact of the matter is, when the beginning phases of a relationship are nearing an end and the “real” shit starts to hit the fan? That’s when you’ll pretty much (deep down inside) make up your mind of how much longer that person is going to work out, or if they’re going to be around indefinitely. It’s the shallow truth in everyone, but heart and mind cover most of that up, patching up those flaws you secretly hate… for a while.

So what happens? You sit there, in your thoughts, drowning in your feelings for the person you’re with, noticing the things, behaviors and characteristics that you might not care for too much, and maybe start to take these details in to consideration: Time investment, tolerance, compromise, sacrifice and (my personal favorite) future plans and wants. You leverage them together to form the bonds of the relationship. Bollocks.

I’m speaking generally, so if this doesn’t apply to you, congratulations! You’re the new relationship expert and you can live in your perfect relationship, with your perfect life, and kick rocks. For those of you normal people, those things you find out as you come out of the honeymoon phase, ignore them or not… weirdly enough, they always tend to resurface later, generally after the two year mark – if you’re a long term, tolerant, patient, forgiving and humane person.

This is when the theory of “love lasts two years” comes from. It’s not like I’m not stating anything you probably haven’t thought or felt at least once in your life regardless. Deny it to yourself all you want, if you want to comment and say “no I haven’t”; go lie to someone else.

Does love not exist? I’ll never say that, ever. I’m simply outlining issues of compatibility between two people.

True love does exist, happens all the time, its fantastic. Do some people get lucky and hit it off with someone their first go at it? Absolutely. There are billions of people on this planet, the chances of meeting someone you’re compatible with, with that many people to choose from, are pretty damn high. What about the rest of us? Some people think that working things through because of the [time investment, tolerance, compromise, sacrifice and future plans and wants] involved, no matter what the situation is, it is ultimately worth it, because they love them. This distorted view of what love is needs to vanish. Absolutely none of any of those points have anything to do with loving someone. Sure, time might be a factor, but is it part of love? Not at all…

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What Does LOVE Include?
Trust: Complete trust, earned trust, mutual trust. All factors of trust are important, and truly need to exist, and cannot be simply assumed, the need to just be there, not made to be there. If you’re a jealous person? Talk to someone about your confidence levels and ask yourself what your problem is, don’t take it out on your significant other, who is (if you’re truly in love) undeserving of it.

Honesty: This goes hand-in-hand with trust. How the hell are you going to put your trust in someone, if you can’t even trust your own actions enough to share them with your partner regardless of what they are?

Loyalty: First off, if you’re cheating – chances are you’re not with the right person to begin with. Love him/her all you want, you’re not satisfied in some way shape or form outside of simply sex. Being loyal to someone is as simple as not putting yourself in a situation where you can, in general. If you’re not satisfied and start to fill a “void” by looking around for a “side thing”? HA! You’ve already lost.

Passion: Sex is important; sure, humans are sexual animals, with a little thing called emotional reasoning mixed in, which makes exclusive companionship healthy, and also personally satisfying. But passion is so much more than simply “doing the deed” to get your rocks off; its enjoying the other person’s touch, the way they smell, how they look at you, dress for you, and treat you affectionately and caringly… Sound sappy? Bullshit, everyone wants to be held every once and while without being engaged in some kind of fuck session, think other wise? Then blame your mother for not holding you enough when you were an infant.

Humor: You can not be with someone if you can’t make them laugh. You can be the un-funniest anti-social person on earth and still find a way to make someone laugh. Doesn’t mean you have to learn to juggle and find ways to turn your eyelids inside out. It just means, if being you at times isn’t humorous to the person you’re with? You’re not only boring and bland to them, but, you’re also going to be replaced by a television every possible chance and there goes my next point.

Communication: The number one downfall to relationships outside of money (which I’ll go over) is lack of communication and too much misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and created/fabricated crap. Every communications book on this planet will have at least one paragraph if not a whole chapter dedicated to the two most important parts of communication. First and foremost, listening. If you don’t know how to listen? Learn or die alone. Pick up a communications book from a college, search google for answers, I don’t care, figure it out, and practice it… truly. This cutting someone off mid-sentence, refusal of listening to someone’s statements, and all of the drama that follows can be circumvented if you simply sit there and shut the fuck up. Secondly, weirdly enough – expressions. Facial and body language, if you’re upset? Slamming shit about and acting like an enraged gorilla will accomplish one thing – more drama. Want a solution? Talk one out. Too pissed off to talk? Take a damn shower, a walk or sit on the toilet and read the paper for a few minutes or so to calm down first, then give it a shot.

Finances: First, money doesn’t mean a god damn thing, but how it is managed and worked with in a relationship – like a serious one? Is actually extremely important. Don’t think so? Try dating someone who’s addicted to gambling so bad they pawn your car to play another hand of blackjack. The game of money in a relationship is all about financial fairness as well as you can make it with what the two of you make. So… money is needed for love? Hell no; but respect for one another’s needs is. Needs need to be met, on both sides of the fence, in all fairness, to reduce the other downfall of relationships… the number one downfall – stress caused by perceived financial unfairness, not strain, not “we don’t got it”, but fairness.

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All that spells out two core things; Respect and Common-Decency toward another person. It has nothing to do with how much time you’re with them, what you plan on doing, what you’re willing to “put up with cause he/she is good to you”, what you’ve given up to be with such person, etc. All those things are just that. Things.

Things mean about as much to a truly meaningful relationship as what was on the Home & Garden channel last Tuesday night. Chances are, if you’ve made it this far through my banter and have ever been in a relationship or are still in one, you’ve seen all these things, and know they all exist at some point or another when with someone.

How do you keep it going once you got it? Once you’ve found who you want to be with? Don’t get caught up in the shallow ends of the situation. If you’re with someone who has things you are unwilling to deal with? Communicate and discuss them to that person, or start doing an injustice to your relationship, and watch it deteriorate. Living with hidden opinions and sacrifices as a result of those opinions will not only eat you up on the inside, it will make your bond weak and your relationship fragile. It will also cause unnecessary stress on the one thing that’s most important to everyone, your heart.

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Over the years, I’ve grown fond of PHP. Being a .NET guy and loathing the bloat, I found PHP to be a lightweight, fast, and reliable alternative to .NET, and a heck of a lot better than working with simple HTML. Now, before I get too far ahead, I’ll say this - for Enterprises solutions, .NET has it’s place, and it’s strengths, especially when integrating with MSFT technologies.

This post isn’t about which language does what better, but I will say this. When it comes to working with WordPress, which is what this post is related to, nothing beats using PHP. Why? Because that’s what WordPress is written in. Thank baby Jesus.

Ok, so - If you’re into designing WordPress themes and want to get started with the programming side, what do you need to know?

Syntax

PHP syntax takes some getting used to, but if you understand what syntax is, then you’re off to a good start. Any coding language takes acclimating to it’s syntax. Here’s an example of some very basic PHP. This stuff prints out text onto the page:

<?php

$world = “Hello”;
echo $world;

?>

Things to note, $world is a variable, this thing can be a string or an integer. In the example above, it’s a string.  The line below “$world” uses a simple PHP command “echo”, this spits out what “$world” is on the web page. So, the above pretty much creates the world “Hello”. The other thing to note are the first and last lines in the example <?php and ?>. These tell the server “hey, listen up! I got something for you to parse!!”. That’s the technical explaination for all that PHP/Apache mumbojumbo.

Simple function stuff

Alright. So, for the next trick, let’s work on PHP and HTML mixergy:

<?php
$this = “example”;
?>
<p>Hello, I’m an <?=$this?></p>

Okay, what then hell just happened? Well, first off, I said variable “$this” is the word “example”. Then in some good ol’ fashioned HTML. What I have a will turn into the paragraph with semi-bad punctuation “Hello, I’m an example”. See? This might be too soon to teach a shortcut, but you need to know, PHP has shortcode for somethings. The one I used above is shortcode for <?php echo $this; ?> … <?=$this?>

You can also do it all on one line, as line breaks don’t really mean squat when you have to make sure you use “;” at the end of each line of code. Consider the semi-colon to be synonymous with the word “stop” in a telegram.

Echo & HTML are your friends

Another example:

<?
$this = “that”;

if($this==”that”) {
echo “<span class=’red’>This equals That</span>”;
}

?>

First, I ditched the <?php and replaced it with <? — This is allowed, I prefer to start pages with <?php, but as I code through with inline <?=$stuff; I switch to dropping the “php” from the leading tag. The second thing to note is $this is defined as =”that”, using one equal sign will define a variable. Third, in the IF statement, I’m asking it to compare a condition. “Hey, IF! Does this == that?”. Double equales is the way to ask PHP politely a question. You can also ask it Does this != (not equal) that? Or is this < (less than) that, > (greater than) that? and so on. For the purposes of WordPress? You’ll need to know what an IF statement looks like, and perhaps make one here & there.

Working with PHP in page-code

Speaking of WordPress, here’s an example of PHP right from a line in this blog’s header.php file.

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Okay, this is pretty straight forward. <title> is a meta tag, you should be familiar with this by now, if you’ve ever coded HTML… at least post-1996. What happens instead of <title>YAY MY BLOG!!!</title> are two PHP functions. Don’t worry, for WordPress, you don’t need to write these functions yourself, they’ve already done it for you.

Notable WordPress Functions

bloginfo() is a function. You can usually spot functions by the (’parathesis’) following a word or two, and by two, I mean something like “blog_info”, not “blog info”, spaces and functions/variables/arrays/etc don’t mix when you’re naming them. Here like this:

$this_is = “a word”; //this one’s ok
$this is = “a word”; //this one’s not cool with PHP
function name_me($something) { //good to go
function name me($something) { //you just broke your site

Simple enough? Let’s carry on. wp_title is a function that spits out the WordPress (wp) Title of your Blog Post or Page. bloginfo(’name’) is going to give you the name of your Blog site. bloginfo(’url’) will give you your URL (www.myblog.com), and things like bloginfo(’rss_url’) will spit out the RSS link for your feed readers.

There’s also plain English, easy to spot functions in pages like index.php of most WordPress themes, such as, <?php get_sidebar(); ?> and <?php get_footer(); ?>. See the pattern? When you’re calling a function() you gotta make sure the paranthesis follow the function name. This tells PHP that you’re calling a function. If you spell it wrong? Don’t worry, PHP will fail to load the page, and will more than likely give you an error about some “undefined function” on line 907 in file.php.

Spotting functions & using them

The reason for the parenthesis are used in functions… well, in the above example? “bloginfo(’name’)”, chances are you’re going to put something in the parenthesis at some point. It’s a way for you to say “Dear Mr. PHP Function, I’d like you to work your magic, but all I want is (X).”

Resources

Honestly, I think you only need two resources to live and survive if you’re working in PHP to mess with WordPress themes and the plug-ins:

1. PHP.NET - Yes, the documentation from PHP on the PHP site is friggin awesome.
2. WordPress Codex - Matt & his team over at WordPress have some of the best damned documentation for any open source CMS/Blog platform on earth. It’s no wonder people love to use & develop their stuff.

Ok, maybe a third, if you still have questions. Post’m here, or contact me. I’m usually down to help someone out who wants to learn stuff: enrique@atenstudios.com

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Tonight, we’re talking about Customizing Wordpress, and a few tricks of the trade that are sure to help make your artsy creation more solid, seemless, and simply better. If you’re itching to make stellar work, there are quite a few things you must do first, but the first thing you do is absolutely the most important:

Planning

Answer these questions before you even get started.

1. What’s your blog for?
   Personal use? Semi-personal use? Professional use?
2. How many columns do you want in your blog?
   Tip: If it’s a personal blog, go with 2, at most, please. 3 columns should be reserved for those monetized blog sites that need less room for content & more room for ads.
3. What plug-ins are you using?
   This one’s big, if you answer this ahead of time, and install the plug-ins before you get started on the design, you can style them accordingly in your theme’s style.css file without skipping a beat.
4. What pages are you planning on having?
   An “About” page and “Contact” page should be default, but do you have other stuff you want? How will those pages be delivered to your readers?
5. How are you planning on reminding people to come back?
   Newletter? Push RSS on your reader-base?
6. What colors are you going to use?
   Are you familiar with Color Theory? Well, let’s make it easy, check out ColorJack, I especially like the Sphere and Studio.

Design

This is the fun part. Photoshop is your friend, but before you get started with the actual design, there’s some things to remember.

1. WordPress themes usually display content a few ways, and you have some wiggle room here.
   Archives, Post list, Categories and Single post views.
2. You may need to consider how you want search results to look
3. WordPress isn’t the typical Navigation, Sub-Nav layout, there are Categories, Pages and Archives to consider as well. Think about how you can deliver those effectively.

Simple enough, right? I mean, after all you’re creating a blog, which is supposed to be reader friendly more than anything else, so making a UI that’s simply un-usable or confusing because it’s cluttered with “pretty stuff” is totally possible and completely avoidable, if you remember what you’re designing anyhow.

Development

PHP is your friend. But more importantly, the simple base functions of WordPress pages are a must-know before you get cracking on this. For me? I learned by opening up a few themes from WordPress, namely the Default theme. The functions are pretty plain english “get_sidebar” and “bloginfo(’url’)” you can pretty much guess what’s going on there.

Once you crack into it, you get the hang of how to build your theme using your own images, and freedom from code hacking from other theme developers by just replacing images you make that match their dimensions.

Here’s an example of placing an image named “whatever.jpg” into your header.php file:

<img src=”<?php bloginfo(’template_directory’); ?>/img/whatever.jpg” alt=”<?php bloginfo(’name’)”>

For grins I tossed in the blog’s name as the alt tag.

Things to remember when developing your WordPress theme:

1. http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development is your friend
2. Creating a simple HTML page with a style sheet attached to it is a good start
3. Index.php, Archive.php, Search.php, Sidebar.php, Searchform.php, Single.php, Page.php all have pieces of UI that you NEED to pay attention too.
4. If you’re using more that one column Sidebar column, perhaps you can tuck those into one Sidebar.php file for simplicity

Wrapping it up

The CSS file has a few things you should include to make your theme yours, use this at the top of your Style.css file:

/*
Theme Name: [name your theme]
Theme URI: [stamp it with your theme's website URL if you have one]
Description: [throw in a description]
Version: [version themes are now recognized by WordPress]
Author: [who are you?]
Author URI: [stamp it with your URL]
.
Released under the <a href=”http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php”>GPL</a>.
.
*/

Another treat is the Screenshot.png file that’s loaded into every theme. Print screen your masterpiece, or if you’re using Firefox try ScreenGrab! to capture your creation. Plant the screenshot into Photoshop, or the like, and save it as a 240 x 180 pixel PNG file.

This talk was given at 7:30pm on December 18th, 2008 for the San Diego Web Designers Meetup group at Urban Grind, San Diego, CA. If you’re interested in attending this meetup group, please check us out at Meetup.com.

Feel free to leave any other tips you have that work for you in the comments.

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