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

Centering your site's layout in the browser window


One of the most popular ways to classify designs on the web is to delineate them as either fixed-width or elastic. Designers who want maximum control over the layout of text, images, and other site elements generally created fixed-width designs. Current trends dictate that fixed-width designs belong in the center of the browser viewing window.

In this recipe, you'll learn how to center your design and make certain that your content is going where you want it to.

Getting started

You should have started writing the basic skeleton HTML of your theme. You need to make sure you have The Loop somewhere in your theme and an overall containing element that wraps all your content: header, main content, and footer.

How to do it...

First, you need to discern what the id of the containing element for your content is. Take the following header code, which is usually contained within the header.php file, as a starting point, as it is fairly typical of a simple...