Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in WordPress. Using custom themes you can brand your site for a particular corporate image, ensure standards compliance, and create easily navigable layouts. But most WordPress users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward. It's easy to create powerful and professional themes for your WordPress web site when you've got this book to hand. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions to create a robust and flexible WordPress theme, along with best practices for theme development. It will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It reviews the best practices from development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins. Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Describing your theme


We very briefly discussed this in Chapter 3, just to get our development going, but let's review exactly what kind of information you can place into your stylesheet which will show up in the WordPress Theme Administration Panel. Essentially, the first 18 lines of the style.css sheet are commented out and without changing anything that comes before a colon (:), you can fill out the following information about your template:

  1. Theme Name: This is where you'll put the full name of your theme.

  2. Theme URI: Here you'll place the location from where the theme can be downloaded.

  3. Description: It's a quick description of what the theme looks like, any specific purpose it's best suited for, and/or any other theme it's based on or inspired by.

  4. Version: If this is your theme's debut, you may want to put 1.0. If the theme has been changed, had bug fixes, or been reincarnated in any way, you may feel a higher version is appropriate. As this is essentially the same theme I've created...