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.

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Small book image
WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook
Nick Ohrn | Lee Jordan
Jul, 2010 | 312 pages
No titles found
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook
WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
WordPress Theme Basics
WordPress Theme Basics
Introduction
Finding documentation on WordPress.org
Downloading themes from the WordPress theme repository
Downloading themes from third-party websites
Installing and activating a theme
Displaying the blog name
Getting the absolute directory path of the active theme
Creating a theme from scratch
Creating a child theme
Creating a theme by using a theme framework
Adding expected WordPress hooks
Including PHP files from your theme
2
Creating Navigation
Creating Navigation
Introduction
Listing all of the pages that exist on a blog
Listing all of the categories defined for a blog
Listing all of the tags in use on a blog
Highlighting the current page in the navigation
Adding a search function to a theme
Getting the category page link from a category name
Displaying page links only if the destination page exists
Creating a category drop-down menu
Creating drop-downs using child pages
3
The Loop
The Loop
Introduction
Creating a basic Loop
Displaying ads after every third post
Removing posts in a particular category
Removing posts with a particular tag
Highlighting sticky posts
Creating multiple loops in a single template
Displaying only posts in a particular category
Styling every other post differently
Styling posts in a particular category differently
Showing every post in a category on a category archive page
4
Template Tags
Template Tags
Introduction
Displaying the post title
Automatically limiting the number of words of content
Determining if the user is on a specific page
Determining if the user is viewing a post in a particular category
Displaying the post date for each post
Highlighting search terms in post content
Displaying login/logout links
Adding navigation through older/newer posts
Displaying an edit link for posts
Displaying custom field content
Displaying a post author's avatar
5
Comments
Comments
Introduction
Displaying a comment form on a post
Displaying comments on a post
Displaying the latest comments on your blog
Highlighting the post author's comments
Alternating the style for comments
Displaying threaded comments properly
6
Sidebars
Sidebars
Introduction
Using the Text widget for custom sidebar content
Including a dynamic sidebar in your theme
Including multiple dynamic sidebars in your theme
Setting the default widgets for a sidebar in your theme
Positioning multiple sidebars in your theme by using CSS
Styling the appearance of sidebars in your theme by using CSS
Displaying different widgets on different
Showing asides in the sidebar by using the Miniposts plugin
Adding an interactive Facebook-style wall to a sidebar by using jQuery
7
Custom Page Templates
Custom Page Templates
Introduction
Creating a simple page template
Creating an archives page template
Creating a taxonomy navigation template
Displaying author avatars and descriptions
Creating a table of contents page template
Showing your pictures from Flickr
Displaying a special template for a specific category
8
Integrating Media
Integrating Media
Introduction
Aligning images properly within a post
Styling image galleries
Styling image captions
Creating a media template
Creating a media template for a specific media type
Displaying a related image for every post
Creating video posts by using the Viper's Video QuickTags plug-in
9
Showing Author Information
Showing Author Information
Introduction
Getting author data via an author's ID
Dynamically displaying the author's name and linked e-mail address
Listing all of the published authors on a site
Listing the authors who most recently published a post
Listing authors by the total number of comments that their posts have received
Adding a custom user field to display an author's Twitter link
10
Adding JavaScript Effects
Adding JavaScript Effects
Introduction
Linking to your theme's JavaScript files directly
Adding JavaScript files to your theme programmatically
Adding a bundled library to your theme programmatically
Creating a featured post slider
Making sidebar widgets toggle-able
Adding a font size toggle
11
Advanced WordPress Themes
Advanced WordPress Themes
Introduction
Adding a theme options page
Allowing for multiple theme color schemes
Changing the default Gravatar icon for your theme
Registering shortcodes for your theme
Localizing your theme
Displaying information based on the logged-in user's role
Packaging your theme for distribution
Uploading your theme to the WordPress.org theme repository
12
Layout
Layout
Introduction
Adding a skip navigation link for usability
Centering your site's layout in the browser window
Setting up a randomly-rotating header image
Making theme components drag-and-drop
Creating a global toolbar for your theme
Creating tabbed navigation for your theme

Adding a font size toggle

Using JavaScript to create fancy animations and add unnecessary but interesting interaction is great. However, the real boon comes when you use it to provide users with something that helps them to use your site, and that emphasizes your content.

How to do it...

First, you need to decide what text you want to be able to resize. For every element that you want resizable text in, add the text-resizable class. In this example, let's set the post content to be resizable, within the WordPress loop in the index.php file, placing the font-resizable opening div tag just above the entry-content opening div tag, then closing both tags, as shown in the following code: 

<!-- make the content entry text resizable --> <div class="font-resizable">
<div class="entry-content">
<?php the_content( __( 'Read More <span class="meta-nav">&raquo;</span>', 'sandbox' ) ) ?>
<?php wp_link_pages('before=<div class="page-link">' . __( 'Pages:...
Previous Section
End of Chapter 10
Next Chapter