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Explaining CSS Selectors Part I
CSS Now that we’ve covered a lot of information on HTML and some brief information on CSS, it’s now time to explore the power of CSS even more. Selectors Selectors allow you to target specific tags, ids, classes, attributes and more, on a page, ie. target a specific item or a group of items. We’ve seen and used these already briefly, to target type selectors (h1, div, p, a, etc), ID selectors (#idname) and class selectors ...
Continue reading10 Admin Plugins for your site
WordPress Plugins Are you starting up a new site or just looking to enhance your existing site? If so, here are my 10 top Admin plugins that are worth a look at. Theme Test Drive Adding a new theme to your site is never a simple case of upload and switch to it. You need to be able to make a few modifications, add in additional code for plugins or your own preferred functions. Being able to see the theme working is a must, but obviously you don’t want the ...
Continue readingHTML Forms III
Design & Coding The final installment of this series about forms, their usage and markup. You can catch up on the previous posts at Part 1 and Part 2. Last week we covered the main form input type which was, appropriately named, the input tag. This now leaves us with select lists, textareas and then a couple of standard layouts. Select Lists A select list is a cross between the radio buttons and checkboxes seen last week. If you force a select list to only ...
Continue readingCreate a Breadcrumb Trail II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I wrote about creating a breadcrumb trail, explaining how to do this for your front page, static Page and single post page. This leaves us with the category page and archives (day, month and year). Category Page The category page is quite similar to the single post page code that we saw last week, except that we use the single_cat_title() function along with the get_cat_id function to get the category ID of the page we’re on ...
Continue readingHTML Forms II
Design & Coding Last week I explained the markup required for setting up the main aspects of a form. This week I’m going to explain the form input tag and its various uses. The input tag The input tag offers us several types of field depending on the value of the type attribute used. The different types available are text, password, checkbox, radio, file, hidden, submit, reset, button, image. The type attribute defines the type of input field we’re ...
Continue readingCreate a Breadcrumb Trail
WordPress Coding & Design Adding a breadcrumb trail to your WordPress site is fairly easy to do. Yes, before anyone mentions it, there are plugins out there to do this for you, but you won’t learn from those unless you actually open them up and change things. So for those of you who actually want to learn how you can easily extend the functionality of WordPress (or for those who just want to copy the final code..!) read on This week I’m going to explain how ...
Continue readingHTML Forms Part I
Design & Coding Forms provide a way for you to get feedback from your site visitors, perhaps as a contact form or a comment form on your blog posts. They’re a more advanced part of your site but very useful to have. A form can consist of text inputs, checkboxes, radio buttons, select lists, textareas, hidden inputs and file uploads, all of which will be explained next week. This week I’m going to explain the basic layout/markup of a form. Standard ...
Continue readingAdding a login box to your site
WordPress Coding & Design If you’re running a multi-author site, or perhaps you allow people to register on your site, then adding the login box into your site would be a nice addition rather than just redirecting people to the standard login page. You could just copy the form off the wp-login.php page, however it’s not very well marked up, plus you will probably want to fit it into a smaller area on the front end of your site, maybe in your sidebar or at the ...
Continue readingUnderstanding the float property
CSS To be able to control your layouts you need to understand the float property. I’ve briefly mentioned this before and given examples of how to use it but not actually explained it in full. Note, for the following examples I’ve used inline styles, purely to give you an example and show you the code used, however, as always, external stylesheets should be used to reduce code, to create reusable code and to use CSS as it was intended ...
Continue readingUsing Sticky Posts
WordPress Coding & Design A new feature with 2.7 is the sticky posts. You can write a post and set it to be sticky, and it’ll stay at the top of your front page until you unstick it. If you’ve also used the new post_class() tag, then you’ll easily be able to target the post and style it differently to the other posts on the page as you get a specific class of ‘sticky’. However, you can go one step further and enhance the post further by ...
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