Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook

By : Nick Ohrn, Lee Jordan
Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook

By: Nick Ohrn, Lee Jordan

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site and give it a professional look, 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 and lot of issues pop up during the process.This easy-to-use step-by-step guide will help you create powerful themes for your WordPress web site, and solve your theme development problems in a quick and effective way. It enables you to take full control over your site's design and branding and make it look smarter.WordPress is distributed with two ready-to-use themes. You can use these themes to give a common look to your website, or use the techniques described in this book to create custom themes. This book includes over 100 useful recipes to help you get started and create advanced themes. It starts with the basics of WordPress themes and creating a theme from scratch. Then, it covers how to enhance your template and add effects to get a rich look. You will learn how to manage pages, categories, and tags for your blogs, and how to make your posts look unique. You will also learn about the comment system and sidebars that will help you give a new feel to your blog and web site.This book will help you through the most common problems encountered when developing a WordPress theme. You will get tips to enhance your design skill and eventually enhance your blog's design.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 1. WordPress Theme Basics

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Finding documentation on WordPress.org

  • Downloading themes from the WordPress theme repository

  • Downloading themes from third-party websites

  • Installing and activating a theme

  • Displaying the blog name

  • Getting the absolute directory path of the active theme

  • Creating a theme from scratch

  • Creating a child theme

  • Creating a theme by using a theme framework

  • Adding expected WordPress hooks

  • Including PHP files from your theme

Introduction

If you're going to be creating or modifying a WordPress theme, it pays to start with the basics. That's what this chapter is all about. By reviewing the recipes contained within, you'll learn how to find useful documentation, how to download and install themes from various places, and what is required if you want to create your own theme from scratch.

As you progress through the recipes in this book, you'll need a theme to work with. If you're an experienced WordPress developer, you'll probably want to create your own theme by using the recipe Creating a theme from scratch contained later in this chapter. If you're just starting out, I recommend using either of the two themes distributed with the base install of WordPress. Both "WordPress Default" and "WordPress Classic" offer solid bases on which you can build your custom theme.