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

Listing all of the categories defined for a blog


Proper categorization of posts is a great way to help visitors find what they are looking for. To make it even easier, a theme could include a list of all of the categories in which there are posts. This technique works best on blogs with a small number of categories.

Alternatively, you can use category drill-downs that change based on the category level that you're at. If you're writing a site about music, you might have Rock, Hip Hop, and Country as top-level categories, each containing second-level categories such as Reviews, Recommendations, and News. In this way, your users can navigate directly to the information that they're looking for, quickly and easily.

How to do it...

First, decide where you want to generate a linked list of all of your categories. If you're taking a drill-down approach as talked about in the introduction to this recipe, then you may wish to put the list of links in the header of your site. Otherwise, category links...