In case you missed it, WordPress release 3.4 included a very exciting new development: the Theme Customizer. This allows users to tweak theme settings using a WYSIWYG interfaceand customize the theme so it includes the colors, fonts, text — and pretty much anything else — they want.
WordPress 3.4 allows you to make extensive customizations to a theme, including colors, fonts, and text.
The purists out there may be throwing their hands up in horror — a WYSIWYG interface! Letting users alter themes themselves! Surely that opens the floodgates for the creation of thousands of ugly, messy WordPress websites? Well, yes, there is a risk of that. But more importantly, the Customizer means that if you’re developing custom themes for client websites, or themes for other developers to use, you have a whole new set of tools to play with.
With the Theme Customizer:
- If you’re developing free or premium themes for others to use, integrating the Customizer will make your themes much more appealing to developers and website owners.
- If you’re building client websites, you can let your client tweak the template content of their website such as the logo, tagline and contact details in a more intuitive way than by using a theme options page.
- For both groups, you can let website users and developers make changes without having to rely on widgets or theme options pages — a less risky and less time-consuming approach.
So, let’s start by having a look at what the Theme Customizer is and how it works for the user.
How The Theme Customizer Works For Users
The Theme Customizer has been integrated into the Twenty Eleven Theme, so you can try it out using that theme. There’s a great video on the Ottopress blog showing you how the Customizer works with Twenty Eleven. Using it is simple:
- On the “Themes” page, search for and activate the Twenty Eleven Theme.
- On the same page, click on the “Customize” link under the current theme’s description.
The “Customize” link is right below the current theme’s description on the “Themes” page. Larger view.
- This brings up the Theme Customizer in the left column, along with a preview of your website on the right.
The Customizer options are shown side-by-side with a preview of your website, so you can test the effect of changes. Larger view.
- To make changes, all you have to do is select each of the available options and edit their settings. The options are:
- Site title and tagline
Edit the title and tagline of the website without having to go to the “Settings” page. - Colors
In the Twenty Eleven theme, you can only change the color of the header text and website background, but as we’ll see, this can potentially be used for much more. - Header image
Choose from one of the default images or remove the header image altogether. - Background image
Upload an image to use as the background of the website. The image below is what happens when I upload an image of some hang gliders to my website. The image can be tiled but unfortunately doesn’t stretch.
- Site title and tagline
You can set your background image to tile, but not stretch. Larger view.
-
- Navigation
Select which menu you want to use for the primary navigation of your website. - Static Front Page
Specify whether the front page of the website should be a listing of your latest posts, or a static page of your choosing.
- Navigation
- Once you’ve made the changes you want, you must click the “Save & Publish” button. Until this is clicked, none of the changes are reflected in the live website. This means you can play to your heart’s content without your visitors seeing your experiments.
Another really exciting way to use the customizer is when previewing themes. If a theme has the Customizer built in, you can use it to make tweaks before downloading and activating the theme.
This demonstrates the Customizer in action with the Twenty Eleven theme, but what about your own themes? How would you harness this to add more functionality in themes you are selling or developing for clients?
So let’s take a look at how to implement Customizer in your theme, and how to add your own customization options.
from : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/03/05/the-wordpress-theme-customizer-a-developers-guide/
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The theme framework you’ve built will be used as a parent theme in the sites you develop. This means that in each case you’ll need to create a child theme to create a unique site with its own design and with extra or different functions compared to the framework.
The obvious way to go about this is to dive in and start creating template files in your child theme to override those in the framework, but thanks to the action and filter hooks you’ve added to your framework, this might not always be the best approach.
In this article, I’ll outline some of the techniques you can use in your child themes to make best use of your framework and improvise your workflow.
The topics I’ll cover are as follows:
Creating starter child themes
Amending code via the framework’s filter hooks
Adding code via the framework’s action hooks
Creating template files in your child theme
When to use a plugin instead
Creating Starter Child Themes framework
The main purpose of developing your theme framework is to adopt the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, and that applies to your child themes, too.
It can make you more efficient if you create one or more ‘starter’ child themes for use with your framework, which contain the core code you need to get started on new projects.
When deciding how to go about doing this, consider the way you work and the sites you build:
Do you create a lot of sites for clients in the same sector with similar needs?
Do you want to offer low cost template based sites to smaller clients?
Are there specific template files you tend to create for most of your new projects?
Is there functionality you need to include on some sites but not others? (For example, I use two starter child themes, one with comment functionality and one without.)
Is there styling you tend to use for most projects, or can you use object oriented styling or a CSS preprocessor for most projects?
Are there libraries or resources you use for most new projects, or for a significant proportion of them?
Do you have two or three main categories you can place projects under, with each category involving similar development work?
If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, then developing one or more starter child themes may save you time. You can create a set of child themes with the basic code that you repeat across all projects using them, and then you don’t need to rewrite that code (or create those files) for each new project.
Note on caveat: If you’re adding some code to every single new project, you may want to add it to your framework instead of to child themes, maybe by using a hook so you can override it if a different need arises in the future.
Even if you answered no to the questions above, it’s worth creating a very basic starter theme with an empty stylesheet and functions file, and adding the instructions WordPress needs to access your framework’s parent theme .
You might also want to create a starter functions.php file with the functions you most frequently use in your child themes. You can then choose to remove any of these and/or add to them for specific projects.
Amending Code via Filter Hooks
As well as adding styling to your child theme, you’ll most likely want to make changes to the code output by the framework. The most lightweight way of doing this is via filter hooks, so it’s worth exploring those first to identify if you can use any of them.
Creating a function which you then attach to a filter hook is much more efficient than creating a whole new template file for the new code; however, if you find yourself doing this repeatedly with the same filter hook, you might want to consider changing that filter hook to an action hook and writing a new function for each project which you activate via that action hook.
To be more efficient, you might want to create a set of relevant functions which you place in the functions file of different start themes or even create a plugin with your function which you activate when needed. I’ll cover plugins in more detail later in this series.
Adding Code via Action Hooks
Your theme framework will also have action hooks which you can use to insert content in various places in your sites.
If you’ve been working on the code files for the framework bundled with this tutorial series, you’ll have seven action hooks to work with:
before the header
inside the header
before the content
after the content
in the sidebar
in the footer
after the footer.
To do this, create a functions.php file in your child theme and .
There is plenty of other content you could add using your action hooks, such as sharing buttons above or below the content, extra content in the footer, a search box in the header and much more.
You might just want to add some content on specific page types, such as single blog posts, in which case the most obvious place to start would be by creating a newsingle.php template. But you can still use your action hooks with the addition of a conditional tag.
Creating New Template Files
On occasion you won’t be able to do what you want using the filter or action hooks in your framework, in which case you’ll need to create new template files in your child themes.
These might be the same template files as are stored in your framework, in which case the files in the child theme will override them. Or they might be new template files, for example for a new category, taxonomy or post type.
If you are creating template files in your child themes, it makes things easier if you use the template files in your framework as a starting point. The steps I follow are:
Identify the template file you need to create with reference to the WordPress template hierarchy
Create a blank file with the appropriate name in your child theme
Identify the file in your framework which is closest to the new file (again with reference to the template hierarchy)
Copy the contents of that into your new file
Make amendments to the new file as required.
Doing this saves you the work of duplicating any code which will be common between your new file and the existing files in your framework, such as the calls to include files.
When to Use a Plugin Instead
Another option you have when creating sites based on your framework is to use plugins in conjunction with your child themes. A plugin won’t replace a child theme completely, but it can be useful in the following circumstances:
The functionality you want to add isn’t theme-dependent (i.e. you want to keep it if the site ever changes theme in future). This might include registering custom post types or taxonomies, for example.
You want to use this functionality on a number of the sites you create, but not enough for it to go into a starter child theme or the framework itself.
I’ll cover developing plugins for your framework in the next part of this series.
Summary
Your theme framework is just the starting point of a library of code and files you’ll create to support the sites you develop. Each site you create will need to run on a child theme, which will have your framework theme as its parent.
As we’ve seen, your child themes will add their own styling and functionality, and they can do this by hooking into the action and filter hooks in your framework, or via the creation of new template files. It’s always a good idea to adopt the solution which needs the least code, as that makes your site faster and your life easier!
from :http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-child-themes-for-your-wordpress-theme-framework–cms-21933
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For many new users of the WordPress platform, defining the difference between these two can be a little bit difficult at first. Thankfully, understanding how they are different is not as hard as it may seem so let’s break it down.
Back in November, I touched on the differences between posts and pages in WordPress. To continue that line of thought, this article will continue that series of learning WordPress basics by touching on the differences between Categories and Tags.
Categories Vs. Tags
For many new users of the WordPress platform, defining the difference between these two can be a little bit difficult at first. Thankfully, understanding how they are different is not as hard as it may seem so let’s break it down.
Categories are meant to be used for a broad topic area and help define what your blog is about whereas Tags are used to zero in on something specific within that category.
Here are some examples of how this works:
- WordPress Themes = Category (a broad topic of discussion)
- Best Magazine Themes For WordPress, Top Themes For SEO, Common Mistakes in WordPress Themes = Tags (something more specific but that relates to the Category at hand)
- Blogging = Category
- Make Money Blogging, Blogging for Money, Work from Home Blogging = Tags
Pretty simple to understand when you think about it, but understanding what they are and using them the right way is a little bit different.
How To Use Categories and Tags Correctly
It’s pretty easy to come up with a vast variety of Categories and Tags for your site and blog posts, but just because you can think of 50 for each doesn’t mean you should use them all. Why not? Well, there are a few reasons.
Categories and Tags have two main purposes: (1) helping with SEO, and (2) helping your users easily find the content on your site.
SEO is important for every site, and Tags and Categories play a part in that. As mentioned earlier, Categories are used to define what your site is about, and most blogs tend to narrow in a single niche (WordPress Tips, Marketing, and SEO are some examples of this.) If you have 50 Categories, it would be harder to define your niche to Google and other search engines; therefore, less is more in this case.
Tags are another great way to boost SEO as they are usually keywords that someone might enter into a Search Engine in order to help them find your post. However, targeting a massive about of keywords by using a ton of tags isn’t going to do you much good. On the other hand, it probably won’t hurt, but it can lead to potential hazards.
Using Tags that sort of relate to your post instead of ones that directly relate to it can bring in the wrong crowd and increase your bounce rate — a major bummer. And if your goal is landing on the first page of a search engine like Google, then not doing keyword research to help you find low competition keywords could make that goal harder to reach.
The other side of the Category/Tag coin is your viewers. If you have around 5-8 main Categories on your site, then finding content that relates to their topic of interest is going to be much easier and thus boost your users’ experience on your site.
Wrapping It Up
In short, using Categories and Tags is important, but don’t go overboard with them. Selecting a few main Categories is usually best, so start with a few broad topics and go from there.
Tags are another area that shouldn’t be ignored, but they also have their place. Only use tags and keywords that directly relate to your content at hand, and try to target a few meaningful tags/keywords that can help concentrate your SEO efforts. Remember that Google is a lady with refined taste and she has no more forbearance for those who try to squeeze in where they don’t fit.
from : http://www.wpeka.com/wordpress-basics-categories-versus-tags.html
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