A quick guide to customizing a WordPress theme

For WordPress beginners, one of the exciting options available to try out later is related to creating a customized WordPress theme. Initially, as a word press novice, you would have gone through the different aspects available in word press including the different themes for doing Ecommerce web design activity. As a next step in using word press, you should be able to customize a word press theme so that it meets the exact requirements set by your client. Customizing a word press theme is quite simple and easy to learn. This section would take you through the steps required to customize a WordPress theme.

Creation of basic files

The first step involves with the creation of certain blank files which come with extensions .css and .php. The blank files that you have to create include

•  Style.css
•  Header.php
•  Footer.php
•  Index.php
•  Sidebar.php

These are the basic files that are required for creating a web site or a blog using word press. After creating these blank files, you need to then add the required functionality within each file. The first file that needs to be set up is the style.css file.

Setting up style.css file

This is the file where you would be mentioning all the cascading style sheet styles that would be used for designing the web pages. In addition to the mentioning of the different styles, you have to also refer a theme name that Word press will refer to while dealing with the theme management aspects.

Updating the Header.php file

The header file would usually contain the HTML information related to logo and navigation icons at the top. The header file would not contain any information related to the web site content or the e-commerce aspects of your web site. In the header, you also have to mention the different WordPress PHP functions that would be used to provide functionalities such as creating dynamic page titles for the different pages of the web site. Some of the other features provided by these functions include

1. Setting up the “Back to home page” navigation aspect
2. Summarized information about the blog or website
3. Listing of the different page links which are available for the site

Updating Footer.php file

The footer file would contain all the closing html tags which have been opened in the header php file. One has to ensure that all the opened HTML tags are closed properly in the footer file.

Updating index.php file

This is the main file that actually contains the blog text and other related images and graphics. Before actually including all the content that should be displayed in the web site or blog, you have to first include both the header and the footer files which have been created earlier. After including the header and footer information, index file would then start work on the content that gets posted to the blog site. You have to make use of the relevant functions such as have_posts() to display the relevant posting on the blog site. The associated HTML formatting features are also provided as part of the index.php file

Updating Sidebar.php file

This file would contain the HTML formatting option that is required for the columns on the blog page. This would include the category list, page list, archive list, registering feature, Login and Log out features.