Blog Stuff we're discovering, learning, reading, watching, enjoying...

As WordPress developers, we’ve all come across the same situation when starting out on a site build… the default WordPress theme sometimes just isn’t barebones enough. Well, the obvious approach is to install a theme which is designed to be a blank canvas from which to start, and Starkers: The completely naked theme for WordPress appears to offer just that. We’ll be giving it a bash it in the near future I expect.

With Wordpress having generally excellent documentation in their codex it’s not often we use other sources as general Wordpress reference material but DBS Interactive have produced a particularly nicely formatted and highly usable Wordpress template tag function list, a worthy alternative to the official Wordpress documentation for template tags.

Here at Common we’re no strangers to Wordpress. In fact, it’s our blog and indeed CMS of choice for many small/medium site requirements. However, it’s often hard to keep up with the rapidly developing options regarding theming so some of the examples covered in fresh trends in Wordpress themes are worth checking out just to see the breadth of experience that can be created beyond the simple blog.

We’ve been exploring the options for easily adding code examples to a forthcoming new section on commonagency.com and CodeColorer definitely seems the most complete of all the available ones. We required a means of presenting various languages including AS3 and PHP, syntax colouring, line numbering, minimal admin effort and decent markup in the output, all in a plugin that must still be in active development but not in alpha/beta! Nearly all the examples tested used the Geshi underlying code but CodeColorer seems to be the best solution so far.

• CodeColorer - our preferred option so far.
• Chili Code Highlighter [still in beta]
• CodeHighlighter [seems good but couldn't tell if it supports AS3]
• FV Code Highlighter [didn't appear to support AS3 and not tested with v.2.7]
• Code Snippet [seems to be one of the original options but no longer in active development]
• Dojox Wordpress Syntax Highlighter [sounds quite good but limited documentation and not in English!]

…and lots more on wordpress.org.