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

AJAX––it's not just for your site's users


I've already mentioned how, when applied properly, AJAX can aid in interface usability. WordPress attempts to take advantage of this within its own Administration panel by enhancing it with relevant information and compressing multiple page forms into one single screen area. The following is a quick look at how WordPress uses AJAX to enhance its Administration panel forms:

New work space features

As of 2.7, WordPress lets you configure your workspaces infinitely, adjusting the panels in the order and configuration you use most.

Even in the main Posts and Pages editor, great, subtle uses of AJAX can be seen, giving you a helping hand in ensuring your site management tasks are handled as fluidly as possible.

pageMash

Plugins aren't just for your site's users. Despite all the nice AJAX interface elements in the 2.7+ Administration panel, I still find this plugin, pageMash, immensely useful in managing sites with several pages. For example, if your WordPress...