Previously had huge respects for Chris Pearson, starting from his Copyblogger theme and then moving on to purchasing the full developer version of his thesis theme.

Today, when I was researching some unrelated topic, I stumbled across the interesting debate between Matt Mullenweg and Chris. I thought this must be huge. The creator of wordpress singling out Thesis and sledging it publicly on twitter. In a war, there can only be one winner…

And after watching this Mixergy Interview, the winner clearly was Matt. I mean c’mon it’s like pitting some small time app developer against Steve Jobs.

Personified’s personality is down the gurgler and I have new found respect for Matt. Chris was obviously overly emotional and took it too personally – a big mistake going out in public when you are not in a calm state. On the other hand, I am very surprised at how relaxed and to the point Matt is. Kudos to Matt for staying rational even when Chris clearly was not.

Things that killed Chris for me:

1. He basically tells Matt to either sue or shut up – wtf?!
2. He has copied slabs of wordpress code and doesn’t know it (yet)
3. He thinks he is in the holy trinity of wordpress gods – seriously!

Selected comments:

The thing that has become most apparent from listening to this interview, is that Chris’ ego is at least the size of Texas. – Thomas Millner

After hearing this conversation, regardless of what I think about the topic I feel very turned off by Chris. I won’t be buying Thesis, and as a resident of Texas I can say his ego is even bigger than Texas. He won’t even close his mouth long enough to hear someone, and calls himself in the top 3 important people in WordPress.

I’m 100% on Matts side, software that requires another piece of software should respect the license of the parent software. GPL says all things running on WP should be GPL. Period. Chris’s business would not be hurt by going GPL, in fact I believe it would give it more credibility. – Jeremy Wilkin

It’s unlikely, but Chris, I want my $87 back. This interview underlines the manic, self-promotional crap that I’ve heard from Pearson before: After I bought Thesis, I subscribed to his twitter feed, then quickly blocked it, because he overshares and rants. And by manic, I do mean emotionally disturbed. He could have his premium theme revenue and show love to the WP community, but instead he obsesses on the WP dev team’s “ideology,” which he seems to think is preventing his success. To get more business from people like me—people running WP business sites—he needs to provide actual support, and communicate his dev plans on time and in detail. To get more revenue through affiliates, he needs to care about and invest in quality interaction with users. Who goes into interviews so unprepared, with no numbers, and says crap like “I don’t want to look that up right now.” Apparently, Chris Pearson. -Dale

Sue that jerk. I respected Chris until I heard this interview. What a prick. Why would you slander the guy who built the platform you are profiting from? Dude, chill out. Put your ego in check. Take an Ambien. Stop ruining your reputation. – Jacob

I can’t believe how many wordpress themes out their tag themselves as seo-friendly and some even have seo in their theme name and they don’t even do the #1 most important use of the h1 tag. Do yourself a favour if you’re a theme designer and use the following:

The h1 tag should be used for the blog title or blog description but only on the home page. On all other pages, we should relegate it to a h2 at most and put more relevance to the post titles by promoting them to a h1.

To do that, make use of the is_single and is_page wordpress functions in your header.php and alternate your h1 h2 blog title tags:

<?php if(is_single() OR is_page()) {
// On single post pages and static pages we use this code
?>
<h2><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h2>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php }
else {
?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php } ?>

Now in you single.php and page.php, update your the_title() to h1

<h1 class="single"><a rel="bookmark" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"></a></h1>

Now because we are using the h2 and h1 tag in the header interchangeably, make sure you style.css caters for both and they look the same

#header h1, #header h2 { font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: normal; padding: 0em 0 0.2em 0; }

do the same for the post title h2 tags in the home page if you need to.

Arne’s google sitemap generator is the best sitemap plugin period so rather than use anyone else’s custom wpmu sitemap solutions, I’ve opted to hack Arne’s.

Way back in 2006, I used to hack the default InitOptions() function to use a manual file location. Nowadays, I find it much easier to just change what it thinks is the default location.


function GetHomePath() {
/* comment everything out and just have the following line */
return ABSPATH . UPLOADS;
}

Next, I need to make sure that the wordpress upload directory has already been created.

function BuildSitemap() {
global $wpdb, $posts, $wp_version;
$this->Initate();

...

That’s it. Simple. Now just redirect all requests for the sitemap to the generated file location. Here I use .htaccess files

#sitemap
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ wp-content/blogs.php?file=sitemap.xml [L]
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml.gz$ wp-content/blogs.php?file=sitemap.xml.gz [L]


That’s it. Works for Google Sitemap Generator v3.2.2