Weblog Tools Collection

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Here at WeblogToolsCollection, we see quite a bit of WordPress theme releases coming through our inbox and I’ve noticed a trend. Hardly any of them include printing support. The question I’d like to have answered is why? Is adding printer support to WordPress themes too hard? Does adding this feature take up time? Or is it that this feature is barely any use to anyone?

For those wanting to add this type of support to your theme, you can install WP-Print. WP-Print picks up where most theme authors have left off by providing printing support in such a way that end users can print either articles or comments, depending on how you have configured the plugin.

In fact, doing a search on the plugin database for the keyword of “print” brought up two pages worth of search results. Another solution for you theme authors out there is called Bunny’s Print CSS. This plugin provides two files, print-css.php which is the plugin file and print.css which is the print stylesheet.

A link to the print stylesheet will be placed in your theme’s header, providing it uses the wp_head() function/hook. An admin panel is added to the Presentations menu and it will allow you to edit the stylesheet if you make print.css writeable. You probably want to edit the stylesheet provided to your liking, though it will hopefully do most of the job if your theme is sandbox-based.

This method takes most of the hard work out of creating a print.css file, even though theme authors would most likely have to modify the stylesheet to make it compatible with their theme.

For those who would like to manually create the style sheet, there is an article on the Codex entitled “Styling For Print” which covers all of the basics necessary to make a pretty, yet functional print stylesheet to include with your theme/themes.

I hope that by linking to the Codex article and bringing this issue to light, we will start to see more themes being released with built in printing support. It’s not a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather see themes that support this feature than those that don’t. My personal opinion is that, printing support is a nice finishing touch to round off any theme, and having it built in allows me and a number of other users to stop using another plugin.

Now it’s time for you to sound off. Is this a trivial issue, or is there anyone else out there that would like to see this feature in more themes?

Jeremy Clarke mentioned to me about a way to search the Codex, WordPress support area and the plugin repository all from within FireFox. If you support users as I do in the WordPress IRC chat room, there are a lot of times where I do a search on the Codex to look up the page for a certain function that someone is inquiring about. Thanks to Jeremy’s tip, I no longer have to visit the actual page to perform a search.

If you visit the MyCroft page on Mozdev.org you’ll notice a number of links that you can click on. Each one of these links are a search engine plugin that was coded for FireFox. What this means is that, you can add WordPress specific search engines to the search engine tool bar within FireFox which is usually occupied by Google by default.

In order to install a SE plugin, simply click on the link that represents the search engine you want to have installed. For example, if you want the WordPress Codex to be one of the search engines within FireFox, click on the WordPress Codex plugin name. Upon clicking on the plugin name, FireFox will ask you if you would like to add the search engine to the list of search engines available in the search bar. Clicking the ADD button will add that specific SE to the list of choices within the search bar.

This tip has been an awesome time saver. Not only can I quickly answer questions in the chat room, but it is more convenient to search the plugin repository from within my browser than to actually search from the actual page.

One of the most annoying issues I have with the Codex is the lack of a printer friendly link. There are plenty of times where I and many others would like to print out an article to keep handy for use later on, or to keep right in front of you as you are performing the steps to a particular set of directions. I was going to work on adding this printer friendly link to the Codex via CSS but thanks to Jeremy Clarke who appeared on episode 6 of the WordPress Weekly podcast, I now know of a way to enable this functionality.

As it turns out, you can register an account with the Codex website. For whatever reason, I’ve never noticed this until it was pointed out to me. Once I registered an account, I saw a wealth of options that I hadn’t seen before. After clicking on My Preferences to manage my account, I noticed I could change the skin that is displayed on the Codex. By default, the Codex (default) skin is chosen, but the one that closely resembles the look and feel of Wikipedia is called Monobook.

After changing the skin, you’ll notice on the left hand part of the page that there is a section called a Toolbox. Within this tool box is the coveted Printer Version link which will change the article’s page layout so that it is printer friendly. I have gone back and changed my skin back to the default codex to see if registering an account produced this toolbox.However, there simply is no printer version link within the default skin.

Personally, I enjoy browsing the Codex through the Monobook skin. Thanks to Wikipedia, many people are already used to the layout, so it shouldn’t be that hard of a switch.