The WordCamp Report

Ann Oyama, aka SuperAnn, works as a WordPress, web, and software developer who programs custom WordPress Themes and Plugins. She also runs BayAnime.com, a community site for San Francisco Bay area fans of anime, manga, and Japanese pop culture. She spoke on WordPress Themes customization.

She began with some basic coverage of good practices for WordPress and code development, then started on some basics of WordPress Themeing, including the stylesheet structure, WordPress Theme template hierarchy, and WordPress template tags.

She recommends you begin structuring and customizing the Theme with the index.php file, since it is used as the primary template file in the hierarchy of a Theme’s template generation.

The custom features she does on almost every Theme she creates begins with the header.php which includes logo, branding, menus and the functions which call in these features. She explained that while some of the changes customers want can happen with the stylesheet, some require editing and customizing the code within the template file.

Next is the sidebar.php, the area most requested to be changed and customized. You need to be familiar with its structure and formatting as well as the WordPress template tags that create and build up the sidebar elements.

The footer.php template file is always changed by customers, even though most ignore it. Horizontal menus are very popular both in the footer and the header, so you must understand how to make horitonal menus from list HTML tags and CSS.

Functions and Plugins are the next step in customizing and styling a Theme. These means understanding how Plugins work and how the code works. You will have to be familiar with how to write and manipulate the code to get it to do what you want, from customizing the various WordPress template files, Plugins, and PHP to actually overriding the pluggable.php functions.

Ann recommends that you do not change the core but change how WordPress works by Plugins and code within the Theme. You can use a variety of functions, filters, and action hooks to make WordPress behave differently. You do not have to interact directly with the database by knowing how these work.

You don’t have to know code to be able to code, just as long as you know some of the basics. Search the web, the WordPress fan blogs and such to find a ton of information on the web to help you customize things.

You can turn any of the code like that into a WordPress Plugin by using a very basic “intro” structure to the beginning of the code to convert it to a WordPress Plugin.

She ran out of time before she got to some of the code features and started answering questions about customizing WordPress Themes. She admits she likes to start with the WordPress Default Theme as she trusts the code in it, though some do not, using the Sandbox Theme which has very clean markup and microformats, allowing greater customization features through the stylesheet.

Anne really thinks of herself as a programmer, not designer, so when she chooses a Theme to start with, she looks at the architecture not the paint and works within that framework to customize and build upon to create a site.

Filed under WordCamp Live.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.