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

Allowing for multiple theme color schemes


In the previous recipe, we covered the general way in which you provide your theme's users with an options page. In this recipe, you'll implement one of the most straightforward features that many premium themes possess: a theme color scheme chooser.

Getting started

You need to have created a WordPress theme containing 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.

How to do it...

You're going to be controlling the color schemes that users can select, by putting each one in a different CSS file. As such, the first thing that you have to do is to create these files. Open your theme's directory and create a new directory named schemes. Inside the schemes directory, create the files blue.css, red.css, and green.css. They should contain the following styles:

@charset "utf-8";
/* Blue.CSS Color Schemes Document Chapter 11 Example 2 */
body{
color:...