Theme Installer

For quite a while now WordPress has had a wonderful tool for finding and installing plugins in WordPress, but themes was a different story. Though the WordPress.org web site listed hundreds of great themes, the only way to get them to work for your site was to download a zip file then upload the files to your web server. If you didn’t know how to use FTP or open a zip file, you could really be lost with this. I have seen quite a few sites running WordPress that are using the classic them included with the WordPress software.

This changes with WordPress 2.8 with the addition of the “Add New Themes” tool that is built into the software. When you click on the option, you get a screen similar to the one on the right (click to enlarge) where you can search for themes with specific keywords, or select from a variety of options (tags) to find a theme. With the hundreds of themes already available you are certain to find one you can use.

When you search for a keyword, or by tag, or use either the “Featured” or “Newest” options on the “Add New Themes” page you will be presented with a list of themes to choose from. You can preview the themes before you install them, but be warned that the preview will have the sample data similar to what you see on the WordPress.org web site. To see how it will look with your data, you will need to install the theme first. Don’t worry, just installing won’t change your site, you still need to activate it.

Once you find one you want to try, click on the install link to install the theme. The pop up window that shows up is a bit confusing at first as you have to scroll the window down to find the button to install the theme. Once you do this the system will download and install the theme for you, then you can preview it with your content or activate the theme on your site. If you don’t like the look of the theme once it’s installed, you can easily delete the theme from the Appearance page.

This feature will really make it easier for people to apply different themes to their site. The fine people at WordPress even included a link to upload themes on this new section so that theme developers can easily share their themes from inside their own site.

There are quite a few other great new features that I want to talk about, but we’ll wait for tomorrow to post those. Let me get a chance to check them out before I tell you all about them. If you want more information on all the wonderful new features of WordPress 2.8, you can check the official announcement or the codex page.

The default 404 Not Found Page

It is great to see that WordPress handles 404 Not Found errors gracefully and displays your web site rather then just a blank page. However, the default page supplied with most themes does not provide much help to your visitor. Click the image to the right to view a sample of the default 404 Not Found page. With a little manipulation, we can make that page a lot more useful.

The 404 Page Not Found pages for your site are generated by the file 404.php template file in your theme. If your theme does not have one of these template files, you should copy one from the “default” folder in your wp-content/themes folder into your theme folder. Open this file in a text editor to make changes or in the Theme Editor area built into the Appearance menu of WordPress.

Page Title

The first change I make is in the header of the page area, where it says “Not Found”. I like to have something a bit more personal in that area. For this site I have changed it to “Content Not Found”. To change the page title, you need to locate the code <?php _e('Not Found', 'kubrick'); ?> in the file and change the text “Not Found” to what you want it to say. This is a pretty simple fix.

Page Content

The default error page has the text “Error 404 – Not Found”, which is too cryptic for most normal web users. I suggest changing this to something more descriptive, perhaps providing instructions on how to fix the problem or at least a link to your home page. To change this text, find the code <?php _e('Error 404 - Not Found', 'kubrick'); ?> and replace the text with your message. You can remove the PHP function if you wish, but leaving this in will allow others to create a language file in their language for your theme. The default page wraps this text in an <h2> tag so if you are creating a longer message, you may want to remove this tag.

A Better Not Found Page

You can stop at changing the page title and the message displayed, which would be a great improvement over the default page. However, the page still is not very useful to your visitors. I like to give them somewhere to go without having to first click on the home page link. For this I list the pages on the site using the wp_list_pages() method in WordPress. To achieve this I add the following code after the message:

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>&show_date=1'); ?>

Now my 404 Not Found page is much more helpful to my visitors. A person could do even more on this page including listing a tag cloud, recent posts or displaying a random post. I will cover these in later articles.

Template Files

The template files in WordPress are used to display the content of your site. There are many template files used for the different areas in your web site. By manipulating these template files you can create a custom look for your site. The template files recognized by WordPress are:

• style.css - (Required) The main stylesheet. This must be included with your Theme, and it must contain the information header for your Theme.
• index.php - (Required) The main template. If your Theme provides its own templates, index.php must be present.
• comments.php - The comments template. If not present, comments.php from the “default” Theme is used.
• comments-popup.php - The popup comments template. If not present, comments-popup.php from the “default” Theme is used.
• home.php - The home page template.
• single.php - The single post template. Used when a single post is queried. For this and all other query templates, index.php is used if the query template is not present.
• page.php - The page template. Used when an individual Page is queried.
• category.php - The category template. Used when a category is queried.
• author.php - The author template. Used when an author is queried.
• date.php - The date/time template. Used when a date or time is queried. Year, month, day, hour, minute, second.
• archive.php - The archive template. Used when a category, author, or date is queried. Note that this template will be overridden by category.php, author.php, and date.php for their respective query types.
• search.php - The search results template. Used when a search is performed.
• 404.php - The 404 Not Found template. Used when WordPress cannot find a post or page that matches the query. This template could be modified to include a table of contents or list of posts for your site.

Theme

The theme for your WordPress site is the collection of template files, images and style sheets that create the entire site. At the very minimum, a theme file will include the template files index.php and style.css. If the theme you are using is missing any template files, WordPress will use the built in files using the Template Hierarchy. It is this hierarchy that makes developing themes for wordpress quick and easy as you do not need to create or modify every template file.

Once you know and understand how the template files and the theme work you can begin to modify an existing theme or build a new theme. In the next few weeks and months I will share with your some fun tricks to making your WordPress web site unlike any other.

This theme is the first in what I hope to be many designed around a specific city. The colors in this theme were chosen to blend well with the photo in the header and not based on any official colors of the city. If you are interested in a theme for your favorite city, please feel free to contact me and I will see if I can build a theme around it for you.

Theme Installer

For quite a while now WordPress has had a wonderful tool for finding and installing plugins in WordPress, but themes was a different story. Though the WordPress.org web site listed hundreds of great themes, the only way to get them to work for your site was to download a zip file then upload the files to your web server. If you didn’t know how to use FTP or open a zip file, you could really be lost with this. I have seen quite a few sites running WordPress that are using the classic them included with the WordPress software.

This changes with WordPress 2.8 with the addition of the “Add New Themes” tool that is built into the software. When you click on the option, you get a screen similar to the one on the right (click to enlarge) where you can search for themes with specific keywords, or select from a variety of options (tags) to find a theme. With the hundreds of themes already available you are certain to find one you can use.

When you search for a keyword, or by tag, or use either the “Featured” or “Newest” options on the “Add New Themes” page you will be presented with a list of themes to choose from. You can preview the themes before you install them, but be warned that the preview will have the sample data similar to what you see on the WordPress.org web site. To see how it will look with your data, you will need to install the theme first. Don’t worry, just installing won’t change your site, you still need to activate it.

Once you find one you want to try, click on the install link to install the theme. The pop up window that shows up is a bit confusing at first as you have to scroll the window down to find the button to install the theme. Once you do this the system will download and install the theme for you, then you can preview it with your content or activate the theme on your site. If you don’t like the look of the theme once it’s installed, you can easily delete the theme from the Appearance page.

This feature will really make it easier for people to apply different themes to their site. The fine people at WordPress even included a link to upload themes on this new section so that theme developers can easily share their themes from inside their own site.

There are quite a few other great new features that I want to talk about, but we’ll wait for tomorrow to post those. Let me get a chance to check them out before I tell you all about them. If you want more information on all the wonderful new features of WordPress 2.8, you can check the official announcement or the codex page.