Drawar

Actually, I'm in the process now of making a custom theme, so your article set couldn't come at a better time, especially the 404 page, which I'm doing now.

Something I find a lot of WordPress developers forgetting to do is secure form data fields, especially the search form box.

I have a small tutorial on that, however it can be expanded. I'll send it over to you.

Gnorb - that's good to hear. I hope you find something worthwhile in there :)

Sean - I'm not entirely sure what you mean so I'd be very interested to read that. Thanks

I always change the default login screen

like http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v493/ayushsaran/blog/wp_login_new.gif

ive blogged about this at http://www.ayushsaran.com/blog/resources/customize-wordpress-login-screen/

I did a custom login screen for a job I did about a month back for Oklahoma State University.

It's just one of those "finishing touches" that big clients like to see.

I must admit I've never considered doing that. The fact I only work for myself (and so don't care what the login screen looks like) probably has something to do with it. It's interesting to see though so thanks for pointing it out.

Make sure to tell people to style their forms! I hate seeing a beautiful site, then seeing Courier New in the text area because they forgot to style it.

*Looks around to see if anyone noticed his unstyled forms fonts*

Ryan the form Nazi will find you, it's IMPOSSIBLE to hide!

I'm working on a multi-author blog and I'm hoping to add some dynamically generated pages (included in the wordpress loop). It would be nice if you could go over how to make an author.php page and maybe how to have archives separated by author and some other selectors if you have time.

I think a lot of this stuff is touched on in the WP Codex, but it's a pretty big mess.

Good stuff BinaryMoon.

I agree, the WP codex needs a MAJOR overhaul!

I have one that's more of a hack for the way the developers decided return output from a function. Most template functions echo the output instead of returning it. This was done for the less php savvy so they don't have to <?php echo the_content(); ?> every time. In my opinion it's a stupid move since it creates an assortment of issues for those who do know how to code and want to change the output of a function (eg: <?php echo myOwnFunction(the_author_url()) ?> would reformat the way a comment author's email looks. By default, with echoing, you can't pass the function through another to sanitize or change the output.

There are two ways to get around this, one of them is simple and requires not editing of the core functons, and that's a separate function of your own that uses output buffering to grab the return of the function. It's better if you're going to use it sparingly (out of the loop). It creates a little more overhead, but it gets the job done.

In my case, with the theme I am working on, I want to change the format of comment author url's. So I decided instead of output buffering every URL that comes through, to just edit the comment_author_url() functions way of returning output. Yes, I'll have to change it should I decide to upgrade or reinstall WordPress, but it's creates less overhead since I don't have the buffer every url.

Don't know if this helps anyone at all or if it gives you another tip/trick/hack to write about, but I'd thought I shed light on it since it may be a little more common for the programmers that want to do something similar to what I am doing with my new theme.

The custom login screen is awesome.. thanks for pointing this out, everyone (here's one I just made).

Thanks for all the comments people. I think I will definitely use the custom login one (with attribution obviously :) ) and the author page is now on my list.

If anyone else has any ideas...

A custom login screen is definitely a good idea when you have multi user blog.

BTW I am also writing a series of post for custom themes. Its good sharing ideas. You definitely have good contents.

One of the idea is a better navigation for your word press blog that is not hard coded.

Have a look at Navigation in Wordpress.

Nice note, Ben.

It's the little things that make all the difference.

One tiny addition I use is to format the 'comments' number. For instance, if there's one comment on an article of mine it'll say at the top:

One lonely but appreciated comment

If there's more than one it'll say:

# very welcomed comments

Here's my custom 404 page.

I've now written about the custom login pages.

I also wrote a plugin and template for creating the images and have set up a flickr group for people to submit their screens too.