The Problem

Many themes use some sort of jQuery slider  to display featured posts. In order to use the slider your theme must load jQuery, the jQuery plugin (for the slider), and most likely custom jQuery code to initialize the slider. Manually adding all javascript files to your theme will work OK until you have a plugin that requires jQuery.

The code will possibly look similar to below:

Once you enable a plugin that requires jQuery and loads it properly you will discover that jQuery has been loaded twice. This will typically cause a conflict and things will break.

The Solution

The correct way to add javascript files to your theme requires using the wp_register_script and wp_enqueue_script functions. The register function does exactly as it says and registers your script(s) for use. The enqueue function actually loads the script in your theme. You can enqueue (load) a script without registering it.

The correct way to add scripts:

In the example above I showed how to use the register and enqueue functions. Both functions take five paramaters and each one is explained below.

• $handle – name of the script, this should be unique
• $src – the full URL of the script
• $deps – an array of scripts required by this script
• $ver – the version of the script
• $in_footer – load script in the footer, default: FALSE

One Caveat

You may have noticed that I used the wp_enqueue_scripts action to register and enqueue the scripts. As of WordPress 3.3 you are required to use the wp_enqueue_scripts, admin_enqueue_scripts, or init actions to register and enqueue stylesheets and javascript. This is pretty simple and does not take a lot of extra effort.

Happy coding!

Paranoid

I cannot recall ever losing any data installing a WordPress theme but if you’re the extremely paranoid type I recommend backing up your site. There are many solutions available and I have not used any of them ;-) Pick one, try it out and hope that all goes well – just in case.

Smart

Before installing a new theme it would probably be a good idea to put your site in some kind of maintenance mode. This will show visitors a temporary page while you setup the new theme. All of our themes are powered by our wonderful Feather plugin which includes such an option. How nice of us right? :D

As an alternative two popular plugins are:

• WP Maintenance Mode
• Maintenance Mode

Important

The most important thing you must do before installing a new theme is to disable all of your plugins. Sometimes conflicts can occur between plugins and themes breaking the function of the plugin and/or theme. If you have 10+ plugins installed it can be difficult to determine which one is causing the issue.

Work

After you have installed your theme (with all plugins disabled) begin to setup your theme. If your theme includes options be sure that all you plan to use are working as expected.

Activate Plugins

At this point your theme should be almost be ready to launch with the exception of the plugins you plan to use. Activate each plugin one-by-one and test the most important sections of your site. While this may seem tedious it can save a lot of work later.

Pro Tip

Ideally it is beneficial to have a development environment to do testing before uploading the theme to your server. This helps to minimize and eliminate errors that may occur.

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Additional Information: WordPress Codex – Adding New Themes

What’s new?

Other than the completely new design, we have migrated our support forum to the bbPress plugin. Less bridges, more stability and continuous updates for the plugin were some of the key points in that decision. Hopefully the forum will also feel a little bit more “modern” now.

Workflow

Over time our development environment became split with a mixture of SVN and GIT repositories. All of our code has been migrated to git (we’re now using github for everything) which will allow us to create new themes and update existing ones much faster.

Giving back

We felt it was time for us to give back to our awesome supporters, and that is what we will do in the form of freebies! New items will be added to the freebies section as time permits. Most of them will be useful PSD resources – but you can probably expect some neat code examples as well.

So there you go, this is WPB version five – we hope that you like it. If you spot any issues with the new site, please let us know.

Thank you for your support!