Hosting web - CHAPTER 17 CUSTOMIZING YOUR BLOG S LAYOUT 463
CHAPTER 17 CUSTOMIZING YOUR BLOG S LAYOUT 463 Participate in the conversation. Have the comment form right there. Find what else you have been discussing. Have links to other articles in the same category. Buy the game you ve just reviewed. Have the link there ready for them. Go off and do more research. Have links to other related sites right there. It may sound strange to want to help people leave your site, but sometimes that is a good thing. Have you ever wanted to return to a site you found useful, but you forgot to bookmark it? You can t remember the URL, but you do remember a related site you visited on your journey to get there. You return to the related site, and try to retrace your steps. Of course, you want your site to be the one everyone wants to visit, but that isn t always the case. Being that related site that people return to find links can be just as important. Having a reputation for being the place to find out about other sites on your subject is one of the things that started this whole weblog business. Changing the Layout In this section, I ll show you how you can configure your blog to cater to different types of users. You ll see how to create different layouts for different views in your blog. Some layouts will have both sidebars, some will have one or the other, and some will have none. First, you need the elements that you will use to build your layouts. Building Blocks Think of a layout as building blocks or puzzle pieces that you want to fit together in certain ways. PHP allows you to split up your files in this way and include them into the original. Furthermore, WordPress encourages this kind of split in its support for theming. The themes supplied with WordPress are structured this way. So, first you ll break down the theme files into multiple pieces. You will take each of the elements of the header, the main section, the individual sidebars, and so on, and split them into separate files. You can then choose to include those files as appropriate based on the type of page to display. Rather than take you through splitting each file piece by piece, I will show you one such piece and leave the rest as an exercise. You will be able to download the completed version from the Source Code area of the Apress web site (http://www.apress.com). The example I will take you through is splitting the rightmost column from the main file into its own file. Listing 17-1 shows the code to be moved. All of this code will go into a new file called sidebar-b.php. The name is not related to its position on the page, because it may not always be on the right.
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