Book Image

WordPress 3.0 jQuery

Book Image

WordPress 3.0 jQuery

Overview of this book

Using jQuery you can create impressive animations and interactions which are simple to understand and easy to use. WordPress is the leading publishing platform that can be customized to power any type of site you like. But when you combine the power of jQuery with WordPress—the possibilities are infinite.The combination creates a powerhouse of possibilities for generating top-notch, professional websites with great usability features and eye catching visual enhancements. This easy-to-use guide will walk you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated, professional enhancements and features, specially tailored to take advantage of the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build several custom jQuery solutions for various types of hypothetical clients and also show you how to create a jQuery and WordPress Plugin.This book covers step-by-step instructions for creating robust and flexible jQuery solutions for today's top site enhancements: expanding/sliding content, rotating slideshows and other animation tricks, great uses of jQuery's UI plugin widgets as well as AJAX techniques. Along with these it will also show you best practices for jQuery and WordPress development. That means, you'll learn how to implement just about any jQuery enhancement you can dream of on a WordPress site and also learn how to do it with minimal edits to the site's theme and while allowing the site's content editors to continue adding content the way they've always been (usually with the WYSIWYG editor), and never having to worry that they'll forget or not know how to add a special attribute or custom HTML to a post to make the jQuery feature work.From development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through enhancement tips and suggestions, to coding, testing and debugging, and ensuring that the WordPress content editor's workflow isn't interrupted by having to accommodate an enhancement with special HTML, this book covers the best practices for not only jQuery development but specifically jQuery within WordPress development.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Wordpress 3.0 jQuery
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Summary


We've now learned how to:

  • Really leverage a theme to aid in jQuery enhancements

  • Enhance the very robust cforms II WordPress plugin with the jQuery ColorBox plugin and a few custom scripts

And this was just one of many ways to achieve this particular solution! As the aim of this book is using jQuery within WordPress, I went down a route that focused more on jQuery and accessible WordPress features. But sure, we could have plugin-ized the ColorBox plugin; we could have plugin-ized the whole thing! Or made a plugin that just extended the cforms plugin. The list of solution strategies is almost endless.

Again, you'll need to look at each project and assess it accordingly. Coming up in the next chapter, get ready to bust out the "eye candy" with some slick HTML and CSS-based chart animation as well as image gallery slideshows and rotators, and a few other clever ways to catch your user's attention.