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 JavaScript files to your theme programmatically


Although you can certainly link to your JavaScript files directly (and in some cases, you may need to, for one reason or another), the preferred method of generating script tags for your theme is to add references programmatically. This allows for the reuse of popular scripts, and ensures that a script is not linked to twice within the same page.

Getting started

You need to have created a WordPress theme that contains at least a style.css file and an index.php file. Inside the template file containing your theme's<head> tag, you need to call the wp_head function. If you have also completed the previous example, open up the header.php file (or whichever file you placed the<script> tag code in) and remove the code added in the last recipe.

How to do it...

First, you must create a JavaScript file to link to. This file will reside within your theme. Open your theme's folder and create a js folder. Inside the js folder, create a...