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

Introduction


One of the most important reasons for the proliferation of WordPress-based sites is the ease with which the software allows web developers and designers to display different content in a myriad of different ways. This starts in the core and extends to the theming system.

First, there is the concept of core template files. Out of the box, WordPress will attempt to load predetermined template files for different types of content. For example, the author.php file, if it exists, is used when a user visits an author's post listing page. Likewise, the home.php file is used when a visitor happens upon the root of the site.

On top of this base system, there is a whole additional level available to theme developers. The developers can create specific page templates that display a variety of content in a very specific way. The templates are created individually when the theme is being developed, and they may or may not rely upon user-supplied content. These types of templates are activated...