The WordPress theme is the core feature behind what we see on the frontend of the site. The theme contains a collection of standard templates as well as theme-specific templates to manage the frontend screens. This chapter focuses on using standard theme features as well as creating custom features through child themes and custom templates. The standard theme features include customizers, menus, and built-in theme options. After reading this chapter, you will no longer be restricted to the default functionality of a theme. You will gain the skills to change the basic elements of a site using a customizer as well as create and use various custom templates in order to handle advanced requirements. Also, you will learn how to keep the customizations independent from your theme to keep them compatible with version upgrades.
In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:
- Using the theme customizer
- Working with custom CSS in live preview
- Using a custom page as a home page
- Creating a child theme
- Styling navigation menus
- Creating conditional navigation menus
- Adding a video header to the theme
- Using conditional tags to control content display
- Creating page templates from scratch
- Creating a custom posts list template
- Creating a custom 404 error page