Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, 2nd Edition

SHING WORDPRESS – BEYOND THE BLO

G

SMASHING WO

R

CHAPTER 6

ADVANCED

THEME USAGE

6

TO MOVE BEYOND traditional

WordPress sites, which build upon the

platform’s blog basics, you need to be

aware of some of the more advanced

features that are available to the theme

developer. Most of these features build

upon the template tags and conditional

tags that you have been using thus far,

but the usage may di er. Some tech-

niques, however, will change or add to

the functionality of WordPress from

within your theme, which may not be

such a good idea if you’re looking to

release it for general use, but may be a

good  t for the project you’re working

on right now.

 at’s what it all boils down to, really:

taking WordPress and putting it to good

use for the task at hand. Building a

WordPress theme and releasing or even

selling it is one thing, but building a fully

 edged WordPress-powered site is

something completely di erent.  is

chapter is all about taking that extra step

and putting WordPress to good use.  is

includes having a sound theme concept,

styling the content the way you want,

adding custom features such as custom

headers and backgrounds, and working

with custom taxonomies when the default

categories and tags won’t cut it. It also

covers adding even more hooks to your

theme for easy inclusion of more features.

Yes, there really is a lot you can do with

your WordPress theme, so let’s get to it.

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