Via WordCamp Seattle Lightning Talk.

-matt

Here are the basics to adding alternate module styles to your own Builder child theme. The following code block would go in your child theme’s functions.php file.


if ( ! function_exists( 'it_builder_loaded' ) ) {
  function it_builder_loaded() {
    builder_register_module_style( $module, $alternate_name, $css_class );
  }
}
add_action( 'it_libraries_loaded', 'it_builder_loaded' );


$module – This is the slug of the module you want to change. It is the default module name, all lowercase with spaces replaced by dashes. ex: A Widget Bar module would be represented as widget-bar. A Footer module would be represented as footer. Rinse and repeat.

$alternate_name – Here, you set the name that you want for your alternate module style. This is what will appear in the dropdown when choosing an alternate module style.

$css_class – Here you can assign a new CSS class to your alternate module style. Any style applied to this class in your stylesheet will be applied to the alternate module style.

It’s just that simple. Here is an example of a working alternate style:

if ( ! function_exists( 'it_builder_loaded' ) ) {
  function it_builder_loaded() {
    builder_register_module_style( 'html', 'Green HTML', 'builder-green-html' );
  }
}
add_action( 'it_libraries_loaded', 'it_builder_loaded' );


-matt

Demo Site | Download

To be honest, I built most of this theme in one night. Brad put together a set of color schemes in about an hour. So why did it take so long to get this released? The WordPress theme review process has undergone some changes recently that make it mighty difficult to get a theme on the repo. While I agree, quality control is important, I did find the process somewhat nit-picky.

One thing I will give the reviewers credit for is their helpfulness. They were more than willing to spend some time with me in the IRC chat room (#wp-themes) and get some of (what they saw as) the kinks out of the theme. Another thing that has improved dramatically since the start of the process is the time it takes to get a theme reviewed. The first and second submission of Quick-Vid sat untouched in the review process for a month EACH. Now, they have the process down to a few days at most.

As far as improvements to the process, the main one I would like to see would be SVN access for the theme author. I think this is especially critical after it has been approved. Theme authors need to be able to push an update with fixes to bugs quickly to their users. Having to re-upload the theme and start the process all over again for a bug fix is a bit ridiculous.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the theme.

-matt

It is called PB-Tweet, and you can download it now on Extend. PB is for PluginBuddy in case you live under a rock.

So download it, test it out, and please let me know what you think. If you like it, please post a link to your site that is using it in the comments of this post.

There is no doubt that a lot is changing. In fact, one of the first things you will notice after you update is that even the dashboard is a different color. With all of these changes, I just wanted to mention a few things you should consider before you update your site to the latest version.

First and foremost, MAKE A BACKUP. Hopefully you make regular backups of your site already. But if you don’t, now is definitely the time to start. If you don’t have a backup of your entire site (database and all), you risk losing everything if there is an incompatibility somewhere during the update. There are several backup solutions available. Some are free, some are paid. As with most things, I believe you get what you pay for. Since your website and content are extremely vital, shoot for the stars and get a good backup solution. Personally, I use BackupBuddy. I highly recommend you skip McDonalds for a few days and pony up the measly $45 to ensure you have a great backup.

Ok, you have a backup. That is crucial. The next thing I would look at is plugin compatibility. In 3.0, there was a major change in the way plugins use the automatic update system in WordPress. Because of this, you will want to make sure that all of your plugin authors went in and updated their code to work in the new system. First, check to make sure you are at the latest version of the plugin. Next, find the changelog or history file that tells you what that latest update did. If you plugin author is smart, he informed you there that his code now works with the new updater.

The last thing I recommend you double-check is theme compatibility. I put this after plugins because a lot more changed for plugin authors than for theme authors. Although tons of new features were added that themes could take advantage of, almost all of them are ‘opt-in’ features. For example, the new 3.0 menu system does not appear in your theme automatically. Your theme author would have to write in the code to make the 3.0 menus work. This is a good thing. That means that if your theme author didn’t update for the new menu code, you old menu will still work just fine. The same applies to custom-post-types and the MU merge.

Hopefully, you won’t have any trouble updating your WordPress install to the latest and greatest. I have been using WordPress since version 2.7, and I have to say that 3.0 is by far the greatest version yet. Enjoy.

-matt

<?php
// Your twitter username.
$username = "TwitterUsername";
// Prefix - some text you want displayed before your latest tweet.
// (HTML is OK, but be sure to escape quotes with backslashes: for example href=\"link.html\")
$prefix = "<h2>My last Tweet</h2>";
// Suffix - some text you want display after your latest tweet. (Same rules as the prefix.)
$suffix = "";
$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";
function parse_feed($feed) {
$stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
$stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
$tweet = $stepTwo[0];
$tweet = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $tweet);
$tweet = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $tweet);
return $tweet;
}
$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

Basically all you have to do is put your twitter id in the top part, and you are pretty well set to go.  The only problem we ran into with this code injected into a sidebar is that the links in a tweet were html coded.  To decode it, we simple added the following line of code:

$tweet = html_entity_decode($tweet);

Add this line in right before the return $tweet and it will filter out the unwanted code. The end product should look like this:

<?php
// Your twitter username.
$username = "TwitterUsername";
// Prefix - some text you want displayed before your latest tweet.
// (HTML is OK, but be sure to escape quotes with backslashes: for example href=\"link.html\")
$prefix = "<h2>My last Tweet</h2>";
// Suffix - some text you want display after your latest tweet. (Same rules as the prefix.)
$suffix = "";
$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";
function parse_feed($feed) {
$stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
$stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
$tweet = $stepTwo[0];
$tweet = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $tweet);
$tweet = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $tweet);
$tweet = html_entity_decode($tweet);
return $tweet;
}
$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

-matt

***** UPDATE: This code has been updated a few times since this post. I know it kind of goes against the title of the post, but if you would like to use this exact code in a plugin that already has style and everything applied, see this post.*****