Archive for the ‘Themedevelopment’ Category

Create a WordPress theme

Monday, February 1st, 2010

To create a wordpress theme the easiest way is proably to use the default theme and make a copy. Then you can change and build from there.

The first step
I’ll assume you have a WordPress installation of your own, on your host or your server. You also need an texteditor to write code in (don’t have an editor? check out open-source-editor.com for links to editors). Your themes are located in /wp-content/themes/.

Find theme

The first thing I want to do is to create a new folder in /wp-content/themes and give it the name I want to use on the theme (no spaces or capital letters).

Create teme folder

As you might see from the image above I’m working on a project called Tysslinge Företagare and I therefore name my theme and its folder “tysslinge”.

Create folder

The next step is to copy all the files in the default theme.

Copy files

And paste them in the folder “xxx”

Paste files

WordPress will not understand that this is a new theme yet. You want to open style.css and change these rows:

  • Theme Name: (use the same name as the folder you created)
  • Theme URI: (the site using the theme)
  • Description: (description of the theme)
  • Version: (version, maybe not very important if it’s just your own)
  • Author: (you)
  • Author URI: (your site)

Have a look at mine:

CSS file for theme

If you are going to use the code from the default theme be sure to give credit to Michael Heilemann fro creating the theme, “Kubrick”.

Time to activate and use the new theme so you can work with it. Login to your wordpress themes admin-panel. Click on “Appearance” in the left menu.

Theme view

You’ll see that the defalt theme is activated, but under “Available themes” you can find your new theme. Click on “Activate” below the theme-icon.

Available themes

The site should now show your own theme when you pay it a visit :) Ok, it looks just like the default layout-theme, but now you have a guide to play with and work from. If an error should occur you can just go back to the default theme again. And I will keep writing and show you how to make it look just like you want it to!

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Hide your version of WordPress

Monday, January 18th, 2010

For better security on your website you can hide the version of WordPress. If you rightclick on your WordPress driven website and select View Source, you will probably see a tag like this one:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.4" />

You should keep your installation of WordPress up to date, but for someone trying to hack your site it might be harder to find the possible issues if they don’t know which version it is. The meta-tag can be inserted in the theme in a couple of methods by the theme designer. Open your themes file header.php and look for the tag

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress " />

Remove it or just replace the content with just “WordPress”. Can’t find it? New themes often use another method to show this meta-tag. They use the function wp_head(); to print version and some other information. Look for wp_head(); in your themes header.php

You don’t want to remove wp_head(); all together, because you don’t know what uses it (it can do more then print version). Do it this way: open your themes file functions.php. If you can’t find it among the other theme-files create it. Add this as PHP-code:

<?php remove_action(’wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’); ?>

Save it and your good to go. If you want to show your using WordPress you can still add the tag manually as described above. Good luck!

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