WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Custom Styles for Sticky, Category, and Tag Posts

In Book VI, you can find the method for putting a very basic WordPress theme together, which includes a Main Index template that uses the WordPress Loop. You can use a custom tag to display custom styles for sticky posts, categories, and tags on your blog. That special tag looks like this:

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

The post_class() section is the coolest part of the template. This template tag tells WordPress to insert specific HTML markup in your template that allows you to use CSS to make custom styles for sticky posts, categories, and tags.

In Book IV, Chapter 1, we tell you all about how to publish new posts to your blog, including the different options you can set for your blog posts, such as categories, tags, and publishing settings. One of the settings is the Stick This Post to the Front Page setting. In this chapter, we show you how to custom-style those sticky posts — it's not as messy as it sounds!

For example, say that you publish a post that has the following options set:

• Stick this post to the front page.
• Filed in a category called WordPress.
• Tagged with News.

By having the post_class() tag in the template, WordPress inserts HTML markup that allows you to use CSS to style sticky posts, or posts assigned to specific tags or categories, with different styling than the rest of your posts. ...