After a bit of work we have finished the first set of tutorials on theme development, we have used the default WordPress 3 twenty ten theme.
The preferred method of theme creating for WordPress is child themes, this is a good way to work as the original theme is not altered in any way, we have used a few of the new functions like template parts, lets look at what we have done so far.
Now we have a clear picture of the layouts for the template pages we want for our theme we have to create the content areas, we were thinking of leaving the names of the Twenty Ten sidebars and just tagging our new areas on the end.
On reflection we will disable the Twenty Ten widgetized areas and add our own, this will make the management of the widgetized areas easier, and we will be able to order them in the workflow we prefer.
In this tutorial we will be removing the WordPress call in the parent theme that creates the widgetized areas, WordPress 3 introduced some new functions one of these will be used to remove the action that loads the sidebars.
We will create a new function that will create our own widgetized areas, this function will introduce us to using arrays to store variable values to be used in a For Each code loop.
Now we can see how easy it is to change things using a child theme we will be moving onto creating widgetized area in our theme and different layouts, we have likely looked at a number of premium themes that boast a number of widgetised areas, number of sidebars and number of layouts, we will be creating a child theme with a number of these features, but key to any project is planning.
In this tutorial we will be looking at what are widgetised areas, the planning of a website, different layouts, how we can use different templates for different pages.
We will decide on the quantity and names of new widgitized areas for our child theme, looking at the flexibility, building in redundancy and allowing for variances.
Over eighteen months ago WordPress introduced built in thumbnail support, this is now a part of the Twenty Ten theme, however many themes like magazine themes and layouts may need a custom size, in this tutorial we will add support for two sizes that we are going to use to display posts with an image and the post excerpt, we will use one of these now for our archive and index page, the other later when we tackle a two column layout.
If we follow the steps in this tutorial we will be able to add two custom images sizes to a theme and retrieve the images to use in our archive and home page post list, we will be looking at the code that returns the images.
We will be editing the loop template part and be able to create a basic magazine style layout for a website using WordPress.
We have created a portfolio theme that combines some of the tutorials on our website with that addition of a few new features, using code snippets from our theme you could enhance your own themes with, the clickable logo, information pane, widgitized footer sitting outside of the sheet and 2, 3, or 4 multi-column posts pages, or you can just use our theme on your WordPress site and just leave our credit link in the footer.
WordPress 2.9+ has support for post and page images, looking at the latest release from Artisteer 2.4 there still is no option to have post images, but it is not such a big problem, let us walk you through it and in less than 30 minutes you will have a post with a nice picture.