WordPress for Designers #3
As with the other posts in this series, This covers days 3 in the wordpress for designers tutorial videos, at blog.themeforest.net.
Creating and Styling our first theme from scratch.
CSS Styles
In order to get our new style to accept and read our new css style sheet we have to configure just a few comments.
like below
/*
Theme Name: cssOrigins.com
Description: the second iteration of the cssOrigins website
Author: Hunter Brelsford
Author URI: http://www.cssOrigins.com
version: 1.0
Tags: Design, WordPress, Css
Optimization: Css Optimization done by Hunter Brelsford 4/23/09
*/
Make sure at this point we save our style sheet. The style sheet fortunately is ready to be read in by our new blog, even though it does not contain any kind of actual style information. All plugins, and stylesheets in wordpress are detected this way, and auto generated into their respective themes, and plugins sections under the admin panel.
If we go on over to see our new theme, we can see that unfortunately that its listed as a broken theme.
Index.php
The reason we have a broken theme is because we have no files other then the style sheet associated with our theme, wordpress needs at least one for it to recognize its theme as a valid workable theme. So we will indulge it by creating a new file and naming it “index.php ”
- create a index.php
- add a title
- save the page
if you want to add your own screen shot for your theme you can additionally upload a 4×3 .jpg up to your themes directory.
Template Tags – 10:05
WordPress has many built in functions that you can use on your site. the ones used in this screen cast are covered and defined here.
- bloginfo(‘name’) – Uses the name of your blog thats been defined in your wordpress settings
- bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’) – Uses the current URL where your activated themes stylesheet is located
- language_attributes(”) – Gives the default language and type direction of the wordpress instalation
- bloginfo(‘html_type’) – Gives the page content type
- bloginfo(‘charset’) – Displays the character set of the page
Template tags are nothing more then php functions in wordpress, these tags are available to access functions and variables from within wordpress.
More information on template tags can be found on the wordpress codex
This article was originally brought to you by Drew Douglass at ThemeForest
