- Recent versions have added the concept of pages and a more robust administration area transforming WordPress into a full CMS - Themes, child themes and plugins have furthered this effort by allowing developers to extend WordPress even further to suit their needs - Special page templates can be defined to give pages custom layouts and can be combined with Custom Fields to allow for varying content areas on a page. - Widgets can allow easy administration of sidebar content
Pages and Posts share many similarities. They can both have a title, content, custom data (fields, etc) associated with them Posts vary in that they can be tagged and categorized Many sites have a news section, and more often companies are wanting a blog. News articles are very similar to blog posts. Usually they have a title, content, a date posted. Powering news with a blogging engine just makes sense, and provides you tagging, categorization, comments and trackbacks Plugins, Themes, Sidebars/Widgets and Custom Fields are the key items that allow for extension of the core content management system WordPress is able to handle various types of media: images, mp3 files, etc. - All can be uploaded via the admin interface using the media management controls A properly structured theme can also handle serving of Ajax content. - Data loaded via Ajax can be stored via theme logic, plugin logic, or in custom fields inside of posts/pages.
WordPress can be used for many different types of sites, from brochure sites up to more robust sites needing dynamic content. Functionality such as eCommerce is possible, although it's probably going to require a fair amount of custom development as no individual plugins have really taken off in popularity for it ... yet.
Colleges are also using WordPress for their sites such as UVA's department of environmental sciences This is a very large site with many pages being administered via WordPress. WordPress can be used to dynamically generate things like drop down menu's since it understands the concept of parent and child pages. - When a page is added into the administration area it can automatically be added to the navigation of the site.
Colleges are also using WordPress for their sites such as UVA's department of environmental sciences This is a very large site with many pages being administered via WordPress. WordPress can be used to dynamically generate things like drop down menu's since it understands the concept of parent and child pages. - When a page is added into the administration area it can automatically be added to the navigation of the site.
WordPress templates are all about CONTEXT The context you are viewing content in drives the template engine View by: - author - tag - category - page - post - date - single post - etc The follow template may not be pretty, but it is the best representation of how the template system works
Required for theme, WordPress looks for it by file name Defines meta data about your theme as well as styles Heading section contains several data points. These data points are used to populate links and data within the administration area
Optional file for themes WordPress looks for it by file name Automatically loaded by WordPress during initialization Can be used to provide an administration page for your theme inside the WordPress admin to allow the user to specify options for your theme
WordPress templates are all about CONTEXT The context you are viewing content in drives the template engine View by: - author - tag - category - page - post - date - single post - etc The follow template may not be pretty, but it is the best representation of how the template system works
get_header() automatically looks for header.php within themes directory get_sidebar() automatically looks for sidebar.php within the themes directory get_footer() automatically looks for footer.php within the themes directory The Loop is really the core of content display inside of WordPress
Loop is required within template files of WordPress tag.php, category.php, etc It is used to display the meat of the page data when loaded and is well documented in the codex. Within The Loop there are helper functions to easily display data related to the Post/Page
The goal here is to allow the user to cache as much as possible. Little bit of trivia regarding HTTP. Browsers are supposed to only make 2 requests per single server at a given time. So the more files (css/images/javascript/html/flash/etc) on your page, the more connections have to be queued to download the information By combining CSS and JavaScript into one file (within reason) the user can get the file downloaded and allow other files to begin downloading at the same time. The same principle is at play with image spirites. For instance by having all of your nav items in one file, the browser can be downloading HTML or other content for the site while your nav is being downloaded as one file (instead of a different image for each nav item and potentially two versions of it ... active or inactive) Minifying CSS/JS, using shorthand in CSS and appropriate compression for images is just keeping in line with the goal of getting content as small as possible
Codex is a wiki maintained by the community and a great resource for finding tutorials and in depth details about all things WordPress Packaging plugins causes dependency issues potentially on the user WordPress itself still supports PHP4 so while not necessary, it's best to support the platforms WordPress might be running on Especially if you plan to list your theme in the official WordPress theme directory, themes attempting to support themselves via paid advertisement placement are not allowed