Building a WordPress theme

Building a WordPress
Theme
Josh Lee

Who am i?
● Owner of QC Creative, a local digital
marketing and web development agency
● Web developer since 2002
● Since 2010, 90% of projects have been in
WordPress
● @joshleecreates

What is a theme?
● WordPress “Core” powers your
administrator dashboard
● A theme tells WordPress how to turn your
content into web pages
● Define layout, colors, fonts, headers,
footers, menus, sidebars, and “widget”
areas

Alternatives...
● WordPress theme directory
● Premium Themes
● Child Theme

Why build a custom theme?
● Complete control of site look-and-feel
● Customize HTML & CSS
● Override look-and-feel of plugins

Components of a Theme
● HTML
● PHP
● CSS
● JS
● Images & other assets

HTML & PHP Basics
a quick refresher...

HTML Refresher
<html>
...
<h1>My Awesome Post</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph of text in
my post</p>
...
</html>

… with PHP
<html>
...
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php the_content(); ?>
...
</html>

PHP Basics
PHP allows logic
operations with
variables:
$x = 1;
$y = 2;
$z = $x + $y;
And with functions:
echo( ‘Hello, World’ );
$post_title
= get_post_title();

PHP Basics
Conditionals:
$x = true;
if( $x == true ) {
echo( ‘x is true’);
}
x is true
Loops:
$x = 0;
while( $x <= 10 ) {
echo( ‘x is: ‘ . $x
);
}
x is: 0
x is: 1
x is: 2
...

The Anatomy of a
WordPress Theme

Anatomy of a WordPress Theme
index.php
style.css

Template Tags
Template tags allow you to use a small PHP
snippet to inject values from your WordPress
database into a page
the_title();
the_content();
the_excerpt();
the_post_thumbnail();

Output or retrieve data
`the_` tags output
content directly into
the page:
<h1>
<?php the_title(); ?>
</h1>
`get_` tags retrieve
values which can be
manipulated first:
<h1>
<?php
$title = get_the_title();
echo( $title );
?>
</h1>

Why?
<?php
$title = get_the_title();
$title = str_replace(“goodbye”, “hello”, $title);
<h1>
<?php echo( $title ) ; ?>
</h1>

Conditional Tags
`is_` template tags return a boolean
(true/false) value, useful for conditional
statements:
is_single();
is_page();
is_category();
is_page( ‘about-us’ );

Why?
...
<?php
if( is_single() ) {
echo( ‘This is a single post:’
);
}
...

Don’t repeat yourself!
WordPress makes it easy to reuse bits of code
in your templates:
● get_header(); get_footer();
o Outputs the content of `header.php` or
`footer.php` if they exist in your theme
● get_template_part( ‘content’ );
o Outputs the content of `content.php` if it exists in
your theme

functions.php
`functions.php` is the most important file in a WordPress
theme — but it is not a template
This is how your theme can use logic to interact with
WordPress and your plugins
Stay tuned for another talk — for now remember:
● functions.php always gets run first, before the rest of
your theme is processed

How does one PHP file do it all?
● WordPress has many different kinds of
“Pages” or “Views”
● Each view retrieves different content from
the WordPress database
● e.g. Homepage, About Page, Blog
Homepage...

The Template Hierarchy
WordPress determines what kind of view is
being requested, and combines the content
for that view with a specific template (PHP
file) from the theme.
The “Template Hierarchy” determines which
PHP template is used for which views.

The Template Hierarchy
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

Views are “Archive” or “Single”
Archive views can
show excerpts or full
content from many
posts:
● Blog homepage
● Category Archive
● Author Archive
● more...
Single views show
content from a single
page or post:
● Static Homepage
● Pages
● Posts
● Custom post types

If all else fails...
If WordPress can’t find a PHP template for a
specific view, index.php is used.
“The Loop” allows you to write the HTML and
PHP for a single post, and have it repeat for
all of the posts included in a view

Which means that:
A single template (like index.php) can render
archive or single pages
(Although this can be kind of a pain to
manage…)

Putting it all together:
● my_awesome_theme/
o archive.php
o comments.php
o content.php
o functions.php
o page.php
o screenshot.png
o sidebar.php
o single.php
o style.css

The Loop
<?php
if ( have_posts() ) :
while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
get_template_part( 'content' );
endwhile;
endif;

Building a WordPress theme

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