This Wordpress SubHeading Plugin uses a custom field to allow sub titles/headings to be added to both posts and pages. The custom subheading field is re-positioned so it is directly below the main title when editing. Adding a subheading to your page or post can be quite helpful for users on fordoing I have added them to the page template. Each sub heading gives the user a little more information about what the page is about.

By default subheadings are also appended to RSS feeds and the admin edit post/page lists.

Subheading screenshot-1

Subheading screenshot-2

Below are a couple of sites that are currently using the subheading plugin already to great affect. Try it out and let me know what you make of the plugin.

Download the WordPress subheading plugin below

For you who love to create your sites in WordPress, @36Flavours has created this skeleton WordPress theme for you. This WordPress skeleton theme will save you time and effort when writing a theme from scratch. It includes all the basic functionality and minimal amount of files to get you up and running.

Is WordPress the best blog/content management system available? I think so, and in 2009 the Open Source CMS Awards thought so too! Smaller portfolio sites and design sites like SixCrayons to HUGELY popular sites like Spotify are all built in WordPress! Below are a few examples of sites using WordPress.

Download the Skeleton WordPress theme below

Twitter has an incredibly sparse user interface. This makes it really easy to use but doesn’t allow a lot of personal information to be shown. Creating your own Twitter background helps make your Twitter profile more personal. You can use the space for content about yourself your business or you can just chuck a giant ugly picture of yourself in there, sorta like I have. :S

Be creative with your background you have to look at your background all the time so make sure you like it. The template sizes within the PSD I have attached for you to download are:

1024 x 768  |  1280 x 1024  |  1680 x 1050  |  1920 x 1200

Download the Twitter background template below

As I work on a lot of sites/forums/email templates that use ads I am always showing clients how different sized ads will look within the layout of their websites. This PSD will hopefully act as a good guide for banner ad sizes you can place within your designs.

Below you can see a preview of the banner ad sizes PSD. Once you have downloaded the PSD you can drag and drop each ad size onto you design easily.

Download the Website banner ad template below

Web page template with 960 grid system

I pretty much use this PSD on a day to day basis as my starting point to designing web pages.

The PSD has the 12 and 16 bar 960 grid system. Even if you don’t like using the 960 Grid system you will find this template useful. Guidelines mark out your 940, 960, and the 1024 pixel lines. If you can’t see any Guidelines turn them on by pressing CTRL ‘H’ (pc) or CMD ‘H’ (mac). Using this as a default base will hopefully give you a starting point for your web designs in Photoshop.

On each of my PSD’s I will release this week you will see I have one white layer above all other layers. Saving a PSD out like this reduces its size by up to 20%. Just a little handy tip if you are struggling to reduce your PSD size.

The PSD’s dynamics are – Width: 1100px Height: 960px

Download the web page template with 960 grid system below

Price:  $0.99 / £0.59

At last the official instrument of Zelda has come to the iPhone! I have always dreamt of the day I could roam around the land playing my very own Ocarina, opening secret caves and calling horses to me willy nilly.

Well now I can do it and for only £0.59p! This app seems to have filled a huge void in my life! My girlfriend on the other hand now wants to break up with me as she realizes the full extent of my inability to please a woman. I thought four hours a night serenading her on my (pretend) wind instrument did it for most girls but obviously not. Owell I still have my Ocarina!

From some of the reviews I have read I think some people have taken the Ocarina app a little too seriously saying absurd things like:

Now any idiot with no Musical talent thinks they can play this thing like a pro!

So what?! I think these people need to chill as this app is totally for the lolz. Even though I am thinking about making a band of 4 Ocarina players called ‘The Ocarinas’ because I am so damn good at playing it. Just think of the groupies!

Here is a little recording I made of myself playing last night can you guess where the songs from? Don’t worry you will not be as good as me right away, it takes practice. ;)

Listen here

So how does this app work?

The Ocarina is sensitive to your breath, touch and movements. Blowing into the microphone at the bottom of your iPhone creates a flute like sound then holding down any of the touch sensitive holes on the screen makes sweet music. You can even tilt your iPhone/Ocarina to change vibrato rate and depth.

You can listen in on Ocarina players all over the world just by tapping the globe icon at the bottom of the screen. Ocarina fans from all over the world have posted hundreds of free easy–to-read scores at http://ocarina.smule.com/.

Buying this app will make you friends, help you learn probably the best musical instrument in the world and gain you the trust and respect of all woodland creatures in Hyrule which is helpful in case you get lost. So Buy it and get jammin.

The iPad has been designed and created for media consumers. It is not geared towards the design community which is probably why we have had such an outcry about the usability of Apple’s new product. It runs the OS software the iPhone uses and not full OS X which is seen as a big let down by designers. Using the same software as the iPhone means that like iPhone the iPad will not allow multitasking.

The size of the device however I really do like. I like the large bezel around the edge it has be thick because of the way it’s held! Not quite sure why everybody keeps slagging this feature so much. The size of the screen is perfect for browsing sites I really don’t think there will be too many arguments about its outstanding browsing capabilities.

What the iPad does not have is a real usefulness and an area it can currently fill and help me with my design. Which brings me to my main point…

How Adobe can help the iPad and themselves

A few days ago Steve Jobs had an alleged rant about Adobe in a meeting screaming:

“Adobe are f#cking lazy! AHHHHHHH” – something like that

His comments were aimed mainly at Flash the fact he thinks it is buggy and this being the reason for not incorporating it into the iPad or the iPhone. Also saying the progress of HTML5 will make Flash more or less pointless for online videos.

However what he may have created with the iPad is the opportunity for Adobe to create a program/app so good for designers I think every designer would want it. If Adobe did get their finger out of their arse and created a PhotoShop app capable of allowing illustration with a pen straight onto the screen it could revolutionize the way we work.

It would turn the iPad into an awesome Wacom almost incomparable to other Wacoms. Small, sleek, sexy, it’s constantly connected to the internet, affordable, and most importantly, it could be superbly productive. For an app like this I would pay up to £200 for.

If you were able to create an illustration or a design layout within a PhotoShop app and then have the ability to save out the PSD you could put it on a USB device upload it to your main computer or even upload it on Dropbox through their free app on the iPad.

This wouldn’t be Apple going into the Wacom market it is them allowing programmers to make apps within the iPad that gives it the same ability’s of a Wacom. It would be small enough to carry everywhere in your rucksack/large handbag. You would be able to sketch down ideas while on the train in the park or even sitting in the pub!

The iPad already does have a working illustration app called Brushes which you draw with your finger. I personally feel this app just isn’t a strong enough reason for me to even think about buying the iPad as it is still so limited with layers and does not allow the creation of vector images.

I’m no genius when it comes to saying how the iPad will do sales wise but even if the iPad had just this one app, I would buy one and I have a feeling that a lot of designers illustrators out there would too.

Gran Torino – by juarezricci

Dr No – by Adamhughes

Princess Mononoko – by syncaidia

Cat women – by Adamhughes

Evil Dead – Army of darkness – by nebezial

StarShip Troopers – by LOPEZMICHAEL

Cowboy Bebop – by 2dforever

Batman – by francis001

District 9 – by patrickbrown

Spider Man – by JPRart

Mad Max – by flyingdebris

Gremlins – by Niarbon

At one point I was going to prepare SixCrayons a post to release over my break then decided against it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing blogs and tutorials but because I feel I have worked hard this year and I do now need a few weeks of doing absolutely nothing on my computer.

I needed to concentrate on having fun and seeing friends. It also gave me a chance to focus on my other hobbies, such as photography.

How are any smaller design blogs supposed to compete with this manufactured never ceasing churn of posting? Well I don’t think we are meant to. I found myself reading the few posts Web Designer Wall and other smaller blogs had written rather than the 30 odd posts Psdtuts had produced as they were of a better quality.

If I have seen ‘The top twenty Photoshop/Illustrator/Website tutorial blogs of 2009′ once, I have seen them a hundred times. There is only so many times I can see the same sites listed for being awesome before I grow tired of seeing them. I suppose what I am trying to get across is I think we need to be blog “less” for the sake of it and blog more consistent original blogs.

For example let’s please have less inspirational giving posts. Let people find inspiration for themselves. That after all is where creativity, originality and real talent comes from. By all means give lists and ways of finding inspiration but photograph after photograph of surreal landscaping and architecture is a bit uninspiring after a while.

I cannot think of one single original work of art that is not derived from earlier sources and is completely unique. We all need inspiration but maybe we need to stop over posting it. Other peoples ideas should be taken and used. Everyone will use them differently and therein lies the artistic genius.

So how often should we really blog then?

As long as you are original with your posting and not repetitive then I think you may post as much as you want. As long as 80% of your posts are not lists of other peoples design posts and icons. By all means Tweet and promote each others work but list after list is becoming daft.

As “bloggers” we are not all at the same scale of PSDtuts and other large sites who are able to pay designers $300 a post for their sites. This is where our challenge lies. We have to produce better quality articles than these sites. I have spoken to many people running successful design sites and they all say the same thing; Once you have a few well written, challenging articles,  success and popularity will eventually follow.

So…. for us small time bloggers it is all about the quality not quantity.

In order to keep each plugin standardised and at the same time speed up the development process, I decided to create a plugin template containing some the features commonly used. After de-constructing my existing plugins it was clear that one of the most common features was the inclusion of a settings page, so have included that in the template.

Introduction

If you haven’t glanced your eyes over the WordPress Codex yet, it’s recommend you start by taking a look at it’s introduction to Writing a Plugin. It outlines all the basic principles and practices of plugin development as well as linking to some other useful resources.

The Template

The template assumes we are writing a plugin called “MyPlugin“, which does absolutely nothing (that’s your task for later) and is stored a directory called “myplugin” in the plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins/).

In this directory there are three files – index.php, readme.txt and settings.php.

It’s recommended that you download the files first and take a look, however the following brief description should prove some insight into what’s there.

readme.txt

If you want to host your Plugin on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, you need a readme.txt file which contains details about the plugin, who it was written by, current version etc.

=== MyPlugin ===
Contributors: Steve Whiteley
Tags: my, plugin, template
Requires at least: 2.8.2
Tested up to: 2.9
Stable tag: 0.1
 
A short description of my plugin.
 
== Description ==
 
A longer description outlining some of the major features.
 
...

index.php

If you open up index.php you will you see the core functionality of the plugin, the following will attempt to break it down a little and explain what it going on.

The first thing you will see are the comments at the top of the file:

/*
Plugin Name: MyPlugin
Plugin URI: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/myplugin/
Description: A short description of the plugin that is displayed on the plugins overview page.
Version: 0.1
Author: SixCrayons
Author URI: http://sixcrayons.com
*/

WordPress will use the details provided here when displaying the plugin within the admin panel.

Our plugin template is going to use a class based structure, my main reason behind this is that it provides a namespace for your functions and allowing for shorter function names and prevention of conflicts.

We are now going to begin writing our class, but first ensuring that there are no classes with the same name in existence:

if (!class_exists('MyPlugin')) {
	class MyPlugin {
		var $name = 'MyPlugin'; // The name of your plugin used for display purposes.
		var $tag = 'myplugin'; // This should be the same value as the plugin directory.
		var $options = array(); // Will hold any settings the plugin has saved.
		function MyPlugin()
		{
			// Fetch any stored plugin options/settings...
			if ($options = get_option($this->tag)) {
				$this->options = $options;
			}
			...
		}
	}
	$myPlugin = new MyPlugin(); // Instantiates the plugin
}

This is pretty much all we need to get the plugin appearing on the plugins list of the admin area, but we really want to add at least a small bit of functionality. Because this template assumes we are using a settings page, we want to make the settings as easy to get to as possible.

This can be done in two ways, adding a link under the plugins side menu and appending a link to the the plugin description on the plugins list. To do this we require two different hooks (admin_menu and plugin_row_meta) which we will add to out class initialisation function.

function MyPlugin()
{
	if ($options = get_option($this->tag)) {
	...
	}
	if (is_admin()) { // Only if we are currently in the admin panel should we add these hooks...
		add_action('admin_menu', array(&$this, 'admin_menu'));
		add_filter('plugin_row_meta', array(&$this, 'plugin_row_meta'), 10, 2);
		...
	}
}
function admin_menu()
{
	// Add a link to the settings page under "Plugins" on the sidebar menu...
	add_submenu_page(
		'plugins.php',
		'Manage '.$this->name,
		$this->name,
		'administrator',
		$this->tag,
		array(&$this, 'settings')
	);
}
function settings()
{
	// Include the settings page when we click on a settings link...
	include_once('settings.php');
}
function plugin_row_meta($links, $file)
{
	// Append a link the after the author URL on plugins list page...
	$plugin = plugin_basename(__FILE__);
	if ($file == $plugin) {
		return array_merge(
			$links,
			array(sprintf(
				'<a href="plugins.php?page=%s">%s</a>',
				$this->tag, __('Settings')
			))
		);
	}
	return $links;
}

We now have two links in place which take you through to the settings page (settings.php). The example contains two options (“Option One” and “Option Two“) and uses the same template found elsewhere on the default settings pages.

settings.php

It also includes a message that is displayed when the settings have been saved.

A settings page requires the settings to be registered by calling register_setting and output settings_fields within the settings page form. Additionally the settings can be validated, but this step has not been included in the template.

The template also stores all the settings in a single options field, helping to keep the footprint of the plugin to a minimum.

Summary

I’d like to round this one off by saying this is certainly not the be all and end all of writing a plugin, however I do find it very useful to have all my plugins in a similar structure. The Plugin API still requires completion in some areas and finding the right hooks and filters can often take some effort, so hopefully this will help save you a fair amount of time.

If you can recommend any “best practices” for plugin development or have your own style then your ideas and feedback are very welcome :).

Download the WordPress Plugin Template