WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
eBook - ePub

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

  1. 292 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

About this book

In Detail

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.

Expert guidance on designing a robust theme for one of the most popular, open-source blog systems available for the Web today!

Approach

Theme design can be approached from two angles. The first is simplicity; sometimes it suits the client and/or the site to go as bare-bones as possible. In that case, it's quick and easy to take a very basic, pre-made theme and modify it. The second is "Unique and Beautiful". Occasionally, the site's theme needs to be created from scratch so that everything displayed caters to the specific kind of content the site offers.
This book is going to take you through the Unique and Beautiful route with the idea that once you know how to create a theme from scratch, you'll be more apt at understanding what to look for in other WordPress themes.

Who this book is for

This book can be used by WordPress users or visual designers (with no server-side scripting or programming experience) who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors.

Regardless of your web development skill-set or level, you'll find clear, step-by-step instructions, but familiarity with a broad range of web development skills and WordPress know-how will allow you to gain maximum benefit from this book.

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Information

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Tessa Blakeley Silver


Table of Contents

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Errata
Piracy
Questions
1. Getting Started as a WordPress Theme Designer
WordPress perks
Does a WordPress site have to be a blog?
Pick a theme or design your own?
Drawbacks to using an already built theme
Using theme frameworks
This book's approach
Core technology you should understand
WordPress
CSS
XHTML
PHP
Other helpful technologies
Tools of the trade
HTML editor
Graphic editor
Firefox
Developing for Firefox first
Summary
2. Theme Design and Approach
Things to consider
Types of blogs
Plugins and widgets
Getting ready to design
A common problem
The solution: Rapid design comping
The radical, new process—is not so new or radical?
Overview of rapid design comping
Getting started
Sketching It
Considering usability
Starting with the structure
Creating your design
The DOCTYPE
The main body
Adding the XHTML file requirements
Attaching the basic stylesheet
Attaching the CSS file
Creating a style.css file and including this basic shell
Basic semantic XHTML structure
Building out the body
Adding text—typography
Starting with the text
Choosing your fonts
Cascading fonts
Font stacks
sIFR
Font sizing
Why pixels?
Keeping it in proportion
Paragraphs
Default links
The layout
Column Layout: Floating div tags versus CSS tables
Posts
Making sure WordPress sticky posts get styled
Forms
Threaded and paginated comments
Navigation
Styling the main navigation
WordPress-specific styles for navigation
Color schemes
Two-minute color schemes
Color schemes with GIMP or Photoshop
Adding color to your CSS
Styling the special TOC headers
Creating the graphical elements
Relax and have fun designing
Slicing and exporting images
Don't forget your favicon!
Making your favicon high-res
Summary
3. Coding It Up
Got WordPress?
Understanding the WordPress theme
Creating your WordPress workflow
Building our WordPress theme
Starting with a blank slate: Tabula rasa
Create a new theme directory
Including WordPress content
Understanding template tags
Getting a handle on hooks
Learning the Loop
Creating a basic loop
Modifying the timestamp and author template tags
Modifying the basic comments display
Including threaded comments
Styling threaded comments
Adding and styling comment pagination
Breaking it up: Header, footer, and sidebar template files
Creating the footer.php template file
Hooking it up: Plugin API hooks
Creating the sidebar.php template file
Making the sidebar dynamic
Hooking it up: Plugin API hooks
The header
Creating the header.php file
Hooking it up: Plugin API hooks
More template files: Home, internal, and static pages
The home page
Creating a custom home.php template file
Creating a second sidebar
Internal pages
Updating the index.php file to be an internal page
Static pages
Creating a custom page.php template file
Quick review
Fun with other page layouts
Don't forget about your 404 page
Creating a custom 404 template file
Even more template files
Adding in the favicon
Activating the favicon
Summary
4. Debugging and Validation
Testing other browsers and platforms
Introduction to debugging
Troubleshooting basics
Why validate?
PHP template tags
CSS quick fixes
Advanced troubleshooting
Quirks mode
Fixing CSS across browsers
Box model issues
Everything is relative
To hack or not to hack
Out of the box model thinking
The road to validation
Advanced validation
Firefox's JavaScript/Error Console
The Web Developer Toolbar
Firebug
Checking your work in Internet Explorer
Run multiple versions of IE
IE Developer Toolbar
Don't forget about the QorSMode bookmarklet
Optimizing for text and mobile browsers
The new mobile Safari browser
Summary
5. Putting Your Theme into Action
A picture's worth
Theme packaging basics
Describing your theme
Licensing
Creating a ReadMe.txt file
Zipping it up
No way to zip?
Performing one last test
Getting some feedback and tracking it
Summary
6. WordPress Template Tag, Function, and CSS Reference
Class styles generated by WordPress
The search bar ID
Classes output by the media manager
Classes output by the sidebar widgets
Classes output by the wp_list_pages template tag
Classes output by the wp_list_categories template tag
post_class class styles
body_class class styles
Why add custom class styles to template tags?
Using the template selector feature
Creating a custom page template
Template hierarchy
Template tags
Author template tag updates in 2.8
Template tags for tags
Adding tag display to your theme
General template tags—the least you need to know
Conditional tags
Including tags into your themes
Creating custom header, footer, sidebar includes
Completely custom—streamlining your theme
Creating a custom include in your theme
The Loop functions
Plugin hooks
WordPress core functions
WordPress shortcodes
Creating a basic shortcode
Summary
7. AJAX / Dynamic Content and Interactive Forms
Preparing for dynamic content and interactive forms
Assessing if AJAX is appropriate for your site
Do it yourself or use plugins
Plugin pros and cons
The AJAX factor
jQuery now comes bundled with WordPress
Including jQuery in WordPress
Avoiding problems registering jQuery
Linking to jQuery from Google Code's CDN
Using WordPress' bundled includes versus including your own or using a CDN
jQuery plugins
Problem with setting up a Lightbox effect in WordPress
jQuery lightBox
Adding jQuery lightBox to your template
Implementing lightBox
jQuery's ThickBox and ColorBox plugins
Plugins and widgets
Plugins
Widgets
Getting your theme ready for plugins and widgets
Preparing your theme for plugins
Installing a plugin
Installing the AJAX comment preview plugin
Preparing your theme for widgets
Making your theme compatible with widgets
Google Reader widget
Installing the Google Reader widget
A small problem you may run into while installing the Google Reader widget
AJAX––it's not just for your site's users
New work space features
pageMash
Installing the pageMash plugin
Summary
8. Dynamic Menus and Interactive Elements
Dynamic menus
Drop-down menus
DIY SuckerFish menus in WordPress
Applying CSS to WordPress
Applying th...

Table of contents

  1. WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

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