Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, 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. It's easy to create powerful and professional themes for your WordPress web site when you've got this book to hand. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions to create a robust and flexible WordPress theme, along with best practices for theme development. It will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It reviews the best practices from development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins. Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Breaking it up: Header, footer, and sidebar template files


Now that we've got the Loop working in our theme, it's time to start breaking the theme down into template files which will help us make sure edits flow consistently across all of the various aspects of the theme.

My rule of thumb for separating markup and code into its own template file is, first and foremost, avoiding duplicate markup and code. Second, you'll be able to create template files to address any unique markup and code that should only appear in special circumstances, like on a home page, but nowhere else.

The most common template files we'll look at first are the header.php, footer.php, and sidebar.php template files. Each of these template fields will be used in various types of pages on the site.

The header should be the same for an article post page as for a static page. The footer should remain consistent across all types of pages on the site. If I update or change the header or footer, I'll want that change to appear...