Wordpress Intro & Child Themes

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a simple and easy to use service for creating websites and web content such as blogs and eCommerce facilities.

In this case, I will be attempting to create a WordPress site with a suite of facilities which will showcase my technical ability in API usage, WordPress functionality, JQuery and other client-side techniques. The site will include:

  • Theme usage (Child themes & modification)
  • Plugins
  • Widgets
  • Custom coding
    • JQuery site enhancements
    • API usage to fetch weather forecast in 'Tom Land'
    • API usage to fetch top 10 shows from Apple. 

Themes 


What are themes?


Themes are essentially the blueprint for the layout of your site. Themes determine how the site will look, and where headers, text, content is placed. 

Themes are easy to make and alter, with thousands of WordPress themes being available on the application. Although, WordPress provides you with their own default 'Twenty Twenty 'x' ' theme for the current year, along with previous years.

child themes

When you are looking to alter the look of your site, but preserve the essence of your chosen theme then child themes are the way to go. Child themes use your chosen theme as a template for you to make minor changes to. All this requires is a bit of copy, pasting, and a single style sheet. 

To make a child theme, I started by creating a new folder within my 'themes' folder within WordPress' pre-generated folders. Normally, this folder's name is '[The theme you wish to template]-child'. In this case, 'twentytwentyone-child'.


Within this folder, we create a single style sheet containing some key information, such as the name of the template theme, and the theme name.


This allowed my new theme to be activated and modified within WordPress. The first theme seen in the selection below is my own created theme, Tom Land.



From there, by pressing the 'customise' button, this theme can be edited slightly to your liking. You can edit everything from background colour and image, to menus and widgets. 

Below is an example of me changing the background image of my site:


In the next post I will discuss WordPress plugins and widgets.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Reddit post

Image
The next piece of the puzzle is to create a post for my subreddit using my application.  For this, Reddit requires key pieces of info or the request will fail. First of all, the 'sr' field is needed, stating the subreddit you wish to post in. Without this, Reddit would not know where to post the content you wish. Secondly, a 'kind' is needed. This could be either 'link', signifying a link to an external source such as a news article, or 'self'. The latter option is for posting a self post (by you) with a title and body - the regular format for a post. Lastly, the title and text of the post is required (obviously). Since this request is being made by AJAX there must be a way to fetch the data that the user has entered in to the request. This stumped me for a while, as my go-to was to use an HTML form, but this system is not synonymous with AJAX, as they achieve the same outcome in a different way. So for this, input boxes with specific ID's are used. ...
Read more

Reddit Authentication & Access tokens

Image
Reddit API For this section, I will be using the Reddit API to perform CRUD on my own subreddit - r/tom_land. Reddit generously offers an API to perform almost all user actions on their site, from scraping posts to moderator duties. Reddit, though, specify in their documentation that users must be authenticated using Oauth to make requests to the API. Oauth is a authentication system which grants access to particular individuals or groups typically using a client ID / secret key combination. This pair is essentially a username and password to access resources on Reddit. Once sent to the server, it knows that you are authorized to access resources, and grants an access token so you can do so. Upon signing up to use the Reddit API, and stating your application is not for commercial purposes, you are supplied with your client ID, and secret key. After making a few test posts on my subreddit, I was ready to start accessing Tom Land.  To begin with, once the document is ready my provide...
Read more

Deleting a Reddit Post

Image
Delete In terms of CRUD, deleting a post is technically part of the easier half. All the server needs to know is what to delete, and that you want to delete it. With the Reddit API, things are not much different. All the server needs is a POST request sent to reddit.com/api/del, with an identifier of the resource to be deleted like an id. Below is my solution to this: As with before, the access token and type are sent in headers. An issue I faced with this request is that I thought the server required the post 'id', which it does not. When reviewing the Reddit API documentation, how the server identifies what to delete is through it's 'fullname' - sent as 'id'. The fullname of an object is the combination of a thing's type such as link, or selfpost, appreviated to 't*_', along with the id of the object itself. for example: t3_fh7si is the fullname for a selfpost with the id of fh7si.  Another issue I faced originally when getting this function to...
Read more