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

Adding expected WordPress hooks


WordPress themes should possess a number of different hooks by default, allowing active plugins to alter or add output when pages are rendered. WordPress development guidelines specify the names and locations of the expected WordPress hooks in themes.

How to do it...

There are three WordPress hooks that you need to add to almost every custom theme. They are:

  • wp_head

  • wp_footer

  • comment_form

First, add the wp_head hook. Find the end tag of the HTML head element (</head>, often in header.php) and place your cursor on the line before it. Insert the following:

<?php do_action( 'wp_head' ); ?>

Next, add the wp_footer hook. Find the end tag of the HTML body element (</body>, often in footer.php) and place your cursor on the line before it. Insert the following:

<?php do_action( 'wp_footer' ); ?>

Finally, insert the comment_form hook. Locate the end tag of the HTML form element for the comment form (</form>, often in comments.php and comments-popup.php) and place your cursor on the line before it. Insert the following:

<?php do_action( 'comment_form', $post->ID ); ?>

If you are using the default comments form layout, you won't have to explicitly add the comment_form hook because it is provided in the default theme's comments.php file.

How it works...

Plugins use these hooks to add to or modify the rendered output of a theme's template files. Often the modification includes linking to or outputting JavaScript, CSS, or HTML code. Many popular plugins use the above hooks, and making sure that they are present is essential to the plugin's proper operation.

There's more...

Although wp_head, wp_footer, and comment_form are the only hooks necessary for a complete theme, it is possible to add many more custom hooks that allow individuals to customize a theme after it has been fully developed by its author.