Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
14
STYLE SHEETS FOR BUILDING
THEMES
Creating Style Sheets
WordPress was designed to simplify the blogging process for people
who want to focus on creating content without worrying about design
or coding. Surprisingly for some, a lot of people choose to give back to
the community by designing themes to enhance the looks of WordPress
blogs and coding plug-ins to enhance the core functionality of
WordPress, making it easier to use. If that sounds like something
you'd like to do, this set of chapters is for you.
In this chapter and Chaper 15, “PHP Basics: Themes and Plug-Ins,” we
cover the basics of tweaking and creating themes using Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS), then look into the guts of WordPress by playing with its
underlying language, the self-referential PHP: Hypertext Processor (PHP
for short). When we're through, you won't be a professional web devel-
oper, but you will know enough to create beautiful themes and write
plug-ins to make your site as functional as possible.
Would-be theme developers need to know the basics of standards-based
web design. In this chapter, you'll become initiated in the ways of the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in designing style sheets and
dynamic pages that work the same in all modern browsers.
Sometimes all you want to do is tweak a setting or two in an existing
theme. You'll learn more about how to do that here as well.
