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

Setting up a randomly-rotating header image


To add some real design pizzazz to your WordPress theme, every time the page loads, you can randomly display different photos or other images in the header section of your theme. You can use this as a technique to generate interest for your visitors, or just as a fun personal experiment. With the method in this recipe, you'll be up and running in no time.

Getting started

You should have a basic theme skeleton created, in order to take advantage of this recipe. In addition, you should also have created a variety of possible header background images, preferably each of the same size.

How to do it...

For the purpose of this recipe, you'll be working under the assumption that you want to randomly rotate the image displayed in the header section of your theme each time the page reloads. The blog title will sit on top of the random image.

First, you need to place the images in the correct place so that the code we're going to write can get to them.

Open the...