Day: November 17, 2008

Ian Stewart on Child Themes in WordPress 2.7

WordPressWeblogToolsCollection.com has a two–part interview with Ian Stewart about changes in the way Child Themes are implemented in WordPress 2.7. WordPress already has a fairly powerful Parent-Child Theme setup that allows you to set up a Theme as a parent and then create a Child Theme that inherits everything in the child theme. You can then screw around with the CSS in the child theme to get the look and feel you want without touching the parent theme.

This way, you avoid having to redo all sorts of changes when the parent theme gets upgraded due to a new WordPress version, etc.

WordPress 2.7 kicks it up a notch,

Secondly, as of WordPress 2.7, template files located in your Child Theme folder will be used instead of the template file in your Parent Theme folder. Don’t like how the header is coded up for a particular theme you want to edit? Copy the header.php file from your Parent theme into your Child Theme folder and make the change there. WordPress, as of 2.7, will look for header.php (or any possible template file) in the Child Theme first and use the Child Theme template file instead. This new feature in WordPress 2.7 makes custom theming really exciting and even easier.

The first thing I always have to do with any WordPress theme is modify the header, and this will make it easy to do that just once and then not have to worry about upgrades and/or when I change Sandbox-based themes (copy the header.php to the new child theme directory).

Very nice.

Organizing E-Mail Archives

I’ve been meaning to respond to this Merlin Mann piece on the best way to organize e-mail archives. And in Mann’s case, his answer is to not bother organizing them . . . or more accurately he never gets around to actually suggesting an organizational structure beyond throw them all in a single archive folder/mailbox.

Part of the problem, of course, is that once people start organizing e-mail they start to over-organize it. I’ve seen people who literally sorted their e-mail into dozens of different topic-based folders. Ugh.

Anyway, I have about 300,000 e-mail messages in my archive, and using a single large archive just isn’t feasible. Instead I simply organize all mail by year and then month. So my Thunderbird archives look like this,

2007
01
02
03
04

etc.

This keeps each archive folder down to a reasonable size while also allowing quick searching just by selecting year/month subfolders (searching on e-mail dates don’t always work because I have e-mail sent or received by systems that did not properly report the date).

It’s a nice compromise between no organizational system at all and some absurdly complex topical/project-based archiving system.