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

Class styles generated by WordPress


As we learned in Chapter 3, WordPress content is generated mostly by those bits of PHP code known as template tags, which look like have_posts or the_category, and so on.

Until recently, WordPress template tags did not output many CSS styles. In Chapter 3, we used the wp_list_pages tag and learned it output a few classes that could be used to style menu items. With the release of 2.7 and now 2.8, we have a few new template tag functions that output quite a few class styles.

What I find particularly nice about WordPress' class styles is they're descriptive and useful and if you choose, optional. I would recommend that you do leverage them and be sure you account for them in your theme's style sheet.

Tip

Styling tip

Remember, you can set CSS styling rules not only for CSS classes such as .classname, but also for XHTML markup objects such as h2, li, p, div, form, and so on, and for IDs such as #idname. In targeting objects, classes, and IDs you have quite a bit...