Web hosting uk - CHAPTER 16 CHANGING THE LOOK OF YOUR
CHAPTER 16 CHANGING THE LOOK OF YOUR BLOG 439 Installing Themes Once you have chosen a theme, you need to install it. Here are the steps: 1. Find the download site and download the zip file. 2. Unzip the theme zip file to your local machine. 3. Upload the files to your server, placing them in the wp-contents/themes folder. 4. Go to the Presentation administration page of your blog and activate the theme (see Figure 16-3, shown earlier in this chapter). If a theme requires a particular plug-in that you don t have installed and the theme author hasn t coded it well, you may get an error message (see Figure 16-18 later in this chapter). If this happens, activate another theme that you know does work and check the readme.txt file or the theme s documentation page (there should be a link to it on the Presentation admin page). The readmefile may mention any requirements for the theme or any restrictions on usage. If you still want to use the theme, download and install any required plug-ins before activating the theme again. (Refer to Chapter 15 for instructions on installing plug-ins.) Modifying an Existing Theme If you cannot find a theme that matches your requirements, you could create your own, but that s not a trivial task. Rather than create a new theme from scratch, it is often quicker to take an existing theme similar to what you want and modify it, assuming the license allows that. This is the approach I describe here. First, let s look at the components of a theme. Examining a Theme s Components A theme consists of two or more files. At the very least, it requires a CSS style sheet named style.css and a PHP template named index.php. The style sheet must contain a specially formatted comment at the beginning of the file. This comment identifies meta-information about the theme, such as a name and description for the theme, version number, URL for the theme, and so on. Figure 16-6 shows this comment for the WordPress Default theme. The PHP file contains the HTML and WordPress tags to display your content. This file contains what WordPress calls The Loop, which is a fairly short but important piece of PHP code that is the heart of your blog page. This code displays the title and contents of your blog posts, as well as information related to it. It also displays a count of the comments a post has and a link to the comments themselves. All the rest of the information displayed on a typical blog page the blog title, links in a sidebar, archive links, and so on is peripheral to The Loop. Most of this other information is displayed by calls to template tags.
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