In this tutorial I’ll explain how the Wordpress loop works and how to bend it to your will. The Loop is the heart of your blog and is used to display your blog posts. We’re going to be looking at a standard theme that uses the basic loop such as the default Wordpress theme or even a theme created with Artisteer. More sophisticated themes will have heavily modified or multiple loops to display the front page. By controlling The Loop you can display what you want where you want. You can insert code before and after The Loop or even inside The Loop between posts. It’s up to you. Below... Read more
This tutorial highlights themes created with Artisteer but can be applied to virtually any theme that doesn’t already have semantic classes. Adding dynamic semantic classes to your theme will allow you to style your theme down to the smallest detail. Suppose you want all of the posts on your blog that occurred in the winter to have a special wintery style. By adding new class functions every post will have an abundance of additional class selectors. This is what the standard Artisteer theme gives you for class selectors on each post. Compare that to the image above. You can see that your... Read more
The sidebars or widget areas in Artisteer all have a generic class assigned to them. This makes if difficult if not impossible to add additional style to just one widget area. An example would be if you wanted to create a theme that needed a unique header image for each widget area. There’s no way to isolate an individual widget. Well, with just a small hack to the functions.php file you can add another class selector to every widget. Find this bit of code in the functions.php… if (function_exists('register_sidebars')) { register_sidebars(2, array( 'before_widget' => '<!---... Read more
Cool Blue is a theme that was created with Artisteer. Artisteer is a great program for quickly creating a basic Wordpress theme structure. It just has a few areas that need some adjustments. I’ve tried to address a couple of those areas with this theme. There’s nothing wrong with the basic generated theme, it’s just that some of the functions are boilerplate and it’s difficult to figure out how the magicians at Artisteer did things. I’m sure that as time goes by Artisteer will incorporate more and more of these type of features. Artisteer saves untold hours in design... Read more
Sidebars don’t belong in the sidebar area anymore. In fact they shouldn’t be called sidebars but widgetized areas. Unfortunately Artisteer’s naming system is sidebar(1) to sidebar(x). Doesn’t mean much to me when it’s in the footer. Here’s how I changed the sidebars to more descriptive names. I’ve included five sidebars, you can have more or less. It’s up to you. You can change the names to anything that makes sense to your theme. Well, here goes… Find this code in functions.php if (function_exists('register_sidebars')) { register_sidebars(2,... Read more
I needed a navigation scheme to display categories below my main nav bar. After a lot of searching I found this navigation scheme for categories and it was pretty easy to integrate into my Artisteer theme. First thing is to drop the following code into your header.php file just after the last closing div (at least on my theme it was the last one). You can put it anywhere you want, you just may have to play around with it bit to get it in the right div container. <div id="header3"> <ul class="nav2"><?php wp_list_categories('title_li=&orderby=ID'); ?></ul><!--... Read more
