PND Theme Q&A

[Nat Arem]

Hey guys,

I don't know if there is any interest here but I am going to put up some "how to" information on making a more advanced custom theme for a site like Poker News Daily. I just finished spending the past week or so working on the new theme that we put up today and I think there is a lot of useful information to be shared.

If you see anything on the site that you have any questions about how we're doing it or you want to learn more about it, post it here and I'll be sure to address it in my "how to" article. In the past I've been a bit hesitant to teach others more advanced WP tricks but I've gotten a lot of good info about things I know less about (like vB plugins) on PAL so I think it's time I give back a bit.

Nat

[MJ]

I don't have any specific questions - but I'd love to read any info you share. I guess one thing I'm interested in is do you utilize plugins or develop custom applications for tasks and features - I've personally been hesitant to build a big site on WP as I hate third party plugins.

[actyper]

Can you add in the FAQ info about the video player you are using. What plugin, what kind of video file it plays, tips and tricks, thanks.

[Bryan]

New theme looks great - nice job.

I did notice that on your online poker rooms page, you're linking to the individual room reviews with a different URL than you are using elsewhere on the site (including the "Top Online Poker Rooms" section in the sidebar). It seems they're being redirected to the correct page, but just wanted to give you a heads up.

[Pking]

It looks fantastic Nat - very, very nice.

[Nat Arem]

I don't have any specific questions - but I'd love to read any info you share. I guess one thing I'm interested in is do you utilize plugins or develop custom applications for tasks and features - I've personally been hesitant to build a big site on WP as I hate third party plugins.

It depends, it's some custom and some plugins. Mostly plugins but I modify a lot of them. Like I use the recently popular plugin for popular posts but it has a modification on it so it is cached.

Can you add in the FAQ info about the video player you are using. What plugin, what kind of video file it plays, tips and tricks, thanks.

Sure, it's jwplayer. They have much more info on their site than I can put on here. The implementation is very simple. We're using mp4 files encoded with the h264 codec.

New theme looks great - nice job.

I did notice that on your online poker rooms page, you're linking to the individual room reviews with a different URL than you are using elsewhere on the site (including the "Top Online Poker Rooms" section in the sidebar). It seems they're being redirected to the correct page, but just wanted to give you a heads up.

Yea, that's an issue. We have the correct URLs but the problem is that we're using the same template on that page as we're using for Interviews, Poker Strategy, etc. So it's pulling in the original post URL before we switched the room review stuff over to pages (which we did a long time ago). That will be fixed this week.

It looks fantastic Nat - very, very nice.

Thanks King