Tag Archives: wordpress theme

Layout

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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.

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Post Images

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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.

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Titles

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We often see requests on various forums asking about removing the blog and or page titles, but the advice we have seen for removing the page title often suggests just hacking or deleting code.

If we follow the steps in this tutorial we will be able to hide the title and description in our templates with css additions, and preserving all the original code in our header.php.  

The blog title is very important as it is indexed by search engines, removing the title could damage our search traffic, so we will deal with the blog title and page titles without doing any damage to our theme, search traffic or ranking.

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Smooth Slider

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There are a number of different slideshows that can be added to WordPress, many of these require the addition of code to the theme, in this series of tutorials we will be using two or three of the slideshows, we are starting with adding Smooth Slider to our home (index) page.

If we follow this tutorial we will be able to add a slideshow to any theme where WordPress 3 is running, in this tutorial we will be adding the slideshow above the content of our blog entries on just the home page.

We have started with Smooth Slider because it is easy to use and administer, we will use a template part to add the slideshow to the theme, this will mean that the slideshow can be added to other pages in the same way if required.

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The Second Menu

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We have all seen the websites with a secondary menu at the top with the more boring page links, what we will do in this part is to create a secondary menu in our twenty ten child theme, lets stop and think about what we want the menu to look like, it would look silly if it had the same style as the main menu so it will need a style of it’s own.

If we follow the steps in this tutorial we will be able to add a second menu bar to a WordPress theme, have looked at theme locations, which is the code that injects the menu into a themes header, and the styling of a new navigation bar. 

We will need to do the following steps, let WordPress know we want a new menu location in the functions.php file, create a new and different style for this menu and add the menu to the header.php

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Getting Started

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For this series of tutorials we need to have a local WordPress setup, this will enable easy deployment of the theme files, this series will be added to over a few weeks, rather than one big set of files we are changing to a more gentle step by step approach.

 We hope that by the end of this series we would have learnt how to create child themes, create template pages with different layouts, add a second menu navigation bar, add a slideshows likesmooth slider, work with post images, and create two and three column templates.

We will not be releasing the support files for this series, the idea is that we work together in creating our templates, if you get stuck we will answer your emails, and send a the file you are stuck on.

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