Coding Fonts is a fabulous resource from CSS Tricks for selecting alternative fonts for your code editor.
While a few of the fonts are commercial, many are open source and/or free.
In Sublime Text 3, changing the font is as simple as downloading and installing the font then opening Preferences > Settings then adding the following line of code to the right-hand pane (within the file ‘Preferences.sublime-settings — User’):
Coloured lists makes identifying their purpose quicker at a glance
This evening I updated a script I first wrote back in March 2014. I wrote about it on the old University of St Andrews web team blog.
The script, which runs in the browser using an add-on such as Tampermonkey, lets you define Trello list titles to search for, and then apply a background colour to it.
A couple of weeks ago I was setting up a new laptop and kept putting off installing Sublime Text (my code editor of choice) because I knew that it would also involve about fifteen minutes patiently working through my curated list of packages (add-ons / plugins), installing each one by one.
There’s got to be a simpler way, I suddenly thought. Sublime Text saves me so much time doing other stuff automatically, surely they’ve thought about this too.
I’m currently building a website for a friend of Jane, using the Divi theme from Elegant Themes. The website is for a holiday property letting company. This post explains how I changed the built-in Projects content type to Properties, and how you can change it to anything you want.
The problem
Divi is a great theme to use: it’s very flexible, it’s responsive (so it works equally well on smartphones as well as huge desktop monitors), and it has the easiest, drag-and-drop editor that I’ve ever used for WordPress.
Divi comes with a built in content type called Projects; WordPress calls them ‘custom post types’. I use this content type on my own website to list the various projects that I’ve been involved in over the years.
As you can see from the WordPress admin menu ‘Projects’ appears on the list beneath Posts, Media, Pages, and Comments:
WordPress menu with Divi installed
Divi also ships with a number of attractive ways to display your projects using its Portfolio and Filtered Portfolio modules. You can even display these full-width or as a grid, such as this:
Demo of Divi’s Filtered Portfolio module displayed as a grid.
These are exactly the features that I’d like to use on the property letting website:
Keep properties separate from pages and posts, using a custom post type.
Display all properties in a grid.
Allow users to filter properties based on the categories that are assigned to them.
So, I want all the features of Divi’s built-in Projects custom post type, but I don’t want them to be called Projects. I want them to be called Properties.
Use a child theme
First, I strongly recommend that you use a child theme when customising Divi (or indeed any other WordPress theme). A child theme inherits the functionality and styling of another theme, called the parent theme, and allows you to make local customisations to it which will not be overwritten when the theme updates.
I copied the code, added it to the functions.php file in my child theme, and set about editing it.
remove_action / add_action
In a nutshell the code from Elegant Tweaks does two things:
It defines a new function — called child_et_pb_register_posttypes() — that will redefine the characteristics of the Projects content type.
It removes the default Projects custom post type contained in Divi, and replaces it with our one in the child theme.
This last point, I believe, is simply to be tidy: rather than clumsily overwriting the existing ‘project’ custom post type it gracefully removes the old one, and creates a redefined version in its place.
Labels
In that Elegant Themes post the author was only concerned with changing the URL from /projects/ to /photos/. So in his example, the names used in the WordPress admin screens still referred to projects: Edit Project, Add New Project, etc. But I want to change these too.
In the code for a custom post type these are referred to as ‘labels’ and are defined in the $labels array. This is what my code looks like now:
As you can see, something I find useful is to list the elements alphabetically. Personally, I find it easier to work this way; your mileage may vary.
Obviously, if you are customising this for your own requirements simply edit this to reflect your needs.
Custom post type options
Next, we define the arguments to be passed to the register_post_type function. These define not only how the custom post type is used but also how it is displayed in the WordPress admin menu: where it sits and what icon it uses.
Slug
The most important option here, for our purpose of customising it, is the 'slug' key. You must set its value (in single quotes) to whatever you need it to be. In my case 'slug' => 'property'. I’ve highlighted this in the snippet below.
Just make sure you don’t set the slug to the same name as an existing page.
Menu icon and position
One useful new addition to the code provided by Elegant Tweaks are the options to set the menu icon and where it sits on the menu.
As these are properties I decided to use the home dashicon.
dashicons-admin-home
I also decided to move it up a bit, from beneath Comments to immediately below Posts. WordPress uses numbers to specify where custom post types should sit, e.g.
5 — below Posts (this is where I want it to appear)
This tells WordPress to apply all of these options to the ‘project’ custom post type.
Because we are redefining this existing custom post type (by changing the URL, the menu labels, the menu icon and position) it means that everything else (the default project page layouts and portfolio modules) will work as expected without any further customization.
Categories and tags
The rest of the code I left untouched. This code defines the categories and tags to be used with the projects/properties custom post type.
How it looks now
Adding all the code (see below for the complete script) this is what my WordPress admin menu looks like:
Divi theme now with Properties instead of Projects
That’s now working as I expect it. Job done.
Complete code
Here is the full code that I have in my child theme’s functions.php file:
Like many things on my blog I’m primarily putting it here for my own reference, but if you find it useful — or would like to suggest improvements or additional features — please leave a comment below.
This plugin allows you to use the Divi builder for Posts, or indeed any custom post type.
Update 3: Fix for Divi 2.5
Saturday 26 September 2015
I’ve now (finally) updated the code to make it work fully in Divi 2.5.
In the end it was quite simple: the add_action(...) and remove_action(...) priorities were wrong in my code. These tell WordPress in which order actions should be executed.
In my previous code I was instructing WordPress to unload the default Divi project custom post type before it had even been defined.
The default priority value is 10; I’d set mine to 0 and 1, respectively.
A huge thank you to Craig Campbell for his excellent Chrome Logger extension and ChromePHP class — two tools that greatly helped me work out what was going on.
I have been using Blumentals WeBuilder now since March 2006—nearly seven years. It’s a solid web code editor and IDE (integrated development environment) but over the last couple of years it has been creaking at the seams a little. Some features were quite slow, others weren’t keeping up with the astonishing rate of change that the web standards have been going through of late.
So, over the last year or so the Blumentals team have been rebuilding the application from scratch, moving to a more up-to-date code base (they code it in Delphi, I believe) making it much faster and preparing the way for future enhancements and improvements. And boy! does it show. The new version is looking great. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
While they were working on what will soon be released as WeBuilder 2014 I found myself—as I do every six months or so—looking around at competing web IDEs to see what they were up to. I tried the usual candidates: Aptana, CodeLobster, Notepad++, NetBeans, Komodo Edit, etc. but nothing grabbed me until I stumbled on Sublime Text 2.
Wow! Sublime Text 2 is fast. Lightning fast. And it’s packed with features, and what it does’t have there is usually an add-on for it — which is most easily installed via the Sublime Package Control. But I digress.
I found myself using Sublime Text 2 more and more, and one of the things that I loved most about it was one of the in-built colour schemes: Monokai (based on a TextMate theme by Wimer Hazenberg). I had never used a dark theme before on an editor, but this one I really liked, and it was much easier on my eyes than the glaring white themes I’ve been using in the past.
Porting Monokai to WeBuilder
When WeBuilder 2014 was released in beta, owner and developer Karlis Blumentals invited users to create and submit colour schemes for WeBuilder (a new feature in 2014). So I set about porting the Monokai theme to WeBuilder.
Every code editor highlights its code syntax slightly differently. The code highlighting in Sublime Text is pretty simple, defining the same colours for a number of elements regardless of the language. So, for example, all strings are #e6db74 (yellow), all keywords are #f92672 (dark pink), etc.
WeBuilder’s colour schemes are more granular: if you want HTML elements within a PHP document to look different to HTML elements within an HTML or ASP document then you can in WeBuilder.
Also, the way that code elements are broken up into different syntax colours is slightly different between editors. It’s more-or-less impossible to port one theme to another editor exactly colour-for-colour, element-for-element. I decided, then, to try to keep within the spirit of the theme.
I relalised fairly quickly, therefore, that I needed to keep things as consistent as I could across all languages. So all strings would be yellow (#e6db74), all numbers (integer or floating) purple (#ae81ff), all HTML tags or language reserved words would be dark pink (#f92672), etc.
I created a spreadsheet to plan things out and document what I was doing.
Spreadsheet of many colours
That really helped. Especially when I did something wrong and reset my entire colour scheme to system defaults. Having documented it as I went along it only took me about 45 minutes to retype it. (A back-up would have been useful, huh!)
I’m really pleased with how they turned out, to be honest. And it would appear that Blumentals Software are too.
Available now
I passed the file to Blumentals last week and it’s already been incorporated into beta 7, which is currently available for download. (The beta versions are free while errors are being addressed, the final version will be available to purchase.)
To say thank you for what I did I received this kind email from @blumentals the other day:
@garethjms – you have earned a free upgrade to v2014 by porting Monokai scheme for our editor
How wonderfully generous of them. I was so delighted by their generosity. I simply did it because I really like the colour scheme, and I wanted in a small way to say thank you to Blumentals for all that they’ve given to the web building community over the last 6+ years.
More themes…
I’m starting work on porting another couple of themes now: Twilight (also used in Sublime Text 2) and Tomorrow, which is a lovely collection of dark and light themes.