Latest news in WordPress Coding & Design
Using the WordPress Lightbox
WordPress Coding & Design Since version 2.5 of WordPress, jQuery and its popular lightbox, thickbox, have been included in the WordPress files. Plenty of people are still using plugins to create their lightbox when they don’t need to now (although, of course some may prefer the design or additional control and options that the plugin may bring). First off you’ll need to include the call to jquery.js in your header as explained in enhance your blog design with ...
Continue readingEnhance your Blog Design with jQuery II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I explained a simple show/hide method with jQuery to allow you to declutter your sidebar. However, the show/hide methods are not very graceful, but now that you have a basic understanding of jQuery, we can look into the other methods available for you to try out. Sliding Rather than an instant show or hide, a sliding animation is much nicer. This is a fairly quick change on what we had last week. Instead of the code [sourcecode ...
Continue readingEnhance your Blog Design with JQuery
WordPress Coding & Design Recently I visited a blog site where the sidebar was so neat and tidy it looked great. There was plenty in the sidebar but thanks to a bit of simple JavaScript the ‘busy-ness’ was contained well. It was using a simple show/hide but worked very effectively. I’ve also seen it in use with hiding a comment form out of the way until it’s needed. JQuery JQuery is a JavaScript library that simplies event handling, animation, ...
Continue readingAccessible Comment Form
WordPress Coding & Design I’m not a designer so the idea of designing my own theme doesn’t appeal to me, however there are plenty of free themes available which means I can have a decent looking site and use my time to actually write content for it rather than procrastinating over how it should look. However, the first thing I do when I download a new WordPress theme for my site is fix the markup. Unfortunately, whilst the themes look great they’re ...
Continue readingCreate a Magazine Style Theme II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I gave an example of how to create a magazine style theme. This method allowed you to have a main post followed by a list of titles. This week I’ll explain how to separate these on the page so that you can have a far greater control over your layout. The Latest Post Rather than using the WordPress loop to display the latest post in full, we can use the get_posts() function to grab the latest post and display it in full. To do ...
Continue readingCreate a Magazine Style Theme
WordPress Coding & Design A few weeks ago I wrote about how to create your own template for WordPress. A type of design growing in popularity is the Magazine style theme. Probably because it comes across as a more professional look and is maybe a bit less overwhelming to first time visitors, as it typically only displays the most recent post in full, and then lists previous posts. The first time I saw a magazine style theme was The Morning After from Arun Kale. There ...
Continue readingCreate a Contact Page Part III
WordPress Coding & Design I recommend you read Part I and Part II of this series if you haven’t already. In the previous posts on this subject, I’ve explained the basic page template and the validation that we need to do for our contact form. Finally we can deal with the actual emailing of the form content and then put it all together. Emailing the form content The theory behind this is to grab all of the information from the form, put it into a message ...
Continue readingCreate a Contact Page Part II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I started a short series on creating a contact page for your site, and wrote about the form markup and CSS. This week I’m writing about validation. Contact forms are notorious for being insecure and left wide open for email header injections, allowing someone to hijack your form and spam anyone and everyone through it. However, there are steps you can take to ensure the email address supplied is valid, even the name given, is of ...
Continue readingCreate a Contact Page Part I
WordPress Coding & Design Once you’ve got an established blog you’ll most likely want a contact page with a contact form on it. Whilst there are a few plugins that do this for you, I tend to find that they either bloat your pages with additional CSS code in the header (CSS code should always be put in an external stylesheet whenever possible), badly written form markup, or probably the worst culprit, the PHP code doesn’t validate the information in the ...
Continue readingCreate Your Own Template II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I explained how to set up your index.php file for your new template. This week I’ll cover the included files, ie. the header, footer and sidebar (if its needed as a separate file). The Header Your header needs to be in a file header.php. This is the file that the function get_header() will include, as explained last week. In the header file goes all the markup from the top of the design that needs to be on every page. First we ...
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