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

Localizing your theme


WordPress themes are used by people all over the world. Luckily, it is relatively easy to localize your theme by modifying code. We will be adding localization functions to text strings, then creating a .po file, adding a tag within our theme so that WordPress knows the theme is localized, then optionally converting any translated .po files to .mo files, and changing the language setting of our theme. The GNU gettext localization system (also referred to as GetText) is used by WordPress to allow strings of text to be tagged as translatable and then looked up in a dictionary. GetText is available by default on all web servers.

How to do it…

Back up your theme files. In this recipe, we will be updating text seen on the administration side of WordPress and the front-end side, by using the localization functions __() and _e().

Go through all customized files and look for any existing text strings that are already contained within<php ?> tags. Add two underscores ...