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

Showing asides in the sidebar by using the Miniposts plugin


Asides are a concept unique to blogging. When a blogger wants to say something, but there isn't enough content to constitute an entire post, they can put it in a special "Aside" category that is displayed in the sidebar, or use a plugin to assign posts as "asides".

Getting ready

You will need a theme that contains a sidebar.php file, or else you can create one using earlier recipes in this book. We will be using a variation of the Classic WordPress theme in this recipe.

How to do it...

Download the Miniposts plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/miniposts/, and unzip the folder. Look for the miniposts folder inside the wrapper folder, and upload it to the plugins folder of your theme. Log into your WordPress administration panel, and then click on Plugins. Click on the Activate link to activate the Miniposts plugin.

Next, go to Appearance | Widgets and drag the Miniposts widget to the main sidebar. There is no additional...