Are you still using TextMate to code your sites?

I’m also a newby to it, but after a day you can do all the basic xml/xslt-stuff to create very dynamic pages with a beautiful backend. My first project with symphony was this. I created the page about a year ago by hand with my own crappy php-solution. A week ago I adapted it to symphony in about two days.

I never did a wordpress theme, but everytime I looked at the themes they seemed to me very complex and hard to handle, which is far more easy in symphony.

A css-class for every section of a site would be the code of:
body class="{$current-page}"
which is really cool.

very much into WordPress myself at the moment - just got to love it :)
will have a go at using your technique in my next project - thanks for sharing :)

PS: and thanks again for your starker’s theme - saving me loads of time these days :)

Essentially, what you do is take the normal page template, make the changes you need to, add save it with another name (like page-film.php and page-links.php, etc.) You need to include this code at the top:

(See here.)

Then, when you’re writing the page’s content, open the Page Template bar on the right side of the edit screen and choose the appropriate template from the list. The templates can be used over and over if your site calls for it; for example, if you create a special page template for Personnel or somesuch, you could have each person have their own page, each using the Personnel template.

Like I said, this may be overkill if you only want to add a class or something like that, but it’s awesome for fine-tuned control when you need a certain page or pages to have individualized content. Super powerful!

As Laura mentioned, page templates are great when you’re making significant changes, but conditional tags do the job when you’re changing minor details.

I did some pretty crazy stuff with the Graphics.net redesign, where I used WP posts for nearly every bit of content on the site, and specified unique content for different pages using conditionals. Here’s how I set the active state of the “blog” tab if you’re on the blog page, on a subpage of /blog, viewing an author archive, viewing a category archive, or viewing a post that’s in the blog category…

if (is_page('5') || is_child('5') || is_author() || is_category() || in_category('7') && is_single()) : echo " id=\"current\""; endif;

Phew! For the PHP n00bs, the || equals “or”, while && equals “and” - handy if you need to specify more than one condition… like being a post and in a certain category as I’ve done here.

Anyway, there’s tons you can do with conditionals, and I have a feeling you’re going to start using them more frequently.

I also used a very similar technique on a recent website for some friends running for charity called ELF Runners (donations are still welcome!). The main difference for me though was to apply the page slug to the body class so I had an easy handle on all the pages (and was very specific).

Maybe I should create a quick write up like yourself…

I’m Donna and I’m new in wordpress and I just want to know in this part of your page “Speaking engagements” are the content dynamic? I hope you’ll answer this and what technique do you use?

Thank Elliot and more power!

Also, like Laura said, Page Templates are another great way to customize your pages. Keep up the good work. :)

Plus the extra code dealt with adding both a class and an ID, as well as checking if the page was an ‘interior’ one or not. I didn’t need anything like this complexity

Re: that extra code, it’s just a product of how I typically design sites — the homepage has a distinct layout, while all interior pages tend to share a layout, so #home and #interior provide hooks for the CSS to edit things like masthead height, column size, and so on. This provides a ton of control and allows me to recycle classes like “.masthead” according to their context rather than creating bloated new ones like “.home-masthead” and “.interior-masthead”.

Then with the dynamic body class, you get additional granularity when you want to tweak specific elements on some pages and not others (just as you were saying):

body.about-us h2 {
color:red}

body.contact-us h2 {
color:blue
}

Hope that makes sense, I seem to have an easier time coding this stuff than articulating it well ;)

Another way to tackle this is through the use of custom page templates.

I’d warn against using them too often as it bloats the theme and reduces your ability to make global changes. The various ways of deploying WP conditionals ultimately make your templates ’smarter’ and less numerous.

http://hunterislandpress.org.au.

The news section (or blog) is a sub-section of the site. So a special template is used on the home page.

So in header.php I simply have a php if else statement that says

if(!is_page()) {
// then the body = News
} else {
// then the body id = the_title();
}

So on normal pages on the site the id is for a page but anywhere in the news section (search, categories, single) the id stays News.

Its a handy little way of isolating the news section entirely for a little special treatment - perhaps a subtle colour as an ambient signifier.

@ Sam Brown: Yep, I’m still using TextMate. I love it!

@ Mark: Thanks for the Symphony link - it looks pretty impressive. Beautifully designed admin section, too! I must admit that so far it doesn’t look like it can do anything WP cannot, but I may well look into this when I get the time (and it’d be a good excuse to get up-to-speed with XSLT).

@ Brian Cobb: Not as far as I know, I’m afraid.

@ Laura & Hamish M: You’re right; using custom page templates means lots of flexibility, although I second Darren Hoyt’s comment about page templates causing unnecessary theme bloating. For instance (and this isn’t best practice at all but just as an off-the-cuff example), you could use the following CSS to hide or display content and just one single page template:

body.pageIsNormal div.sidebarOne { display:block }
body.pageIsNormal div.sidebarTwo { display:none }
body.pageIsSpecial div.sidebarOne { display:none }
body.pageIsSpecial div.sidebarTwo { display:block }

@ Matt Brett: Thanks for sharing the tips about conditional comments - this is really useful stuff. In fact I can think of a project I can use that code in straight away! Might IM you later about it…

@ Donna: I’m afraid the ’speaking engagements’ links are actually hard-coded. They’ll be dynamic in the next version of the site, though, so I’ll be sure to do a write-up.

@ Darren Hoyt: Thanks! And yeah, the interior thing makes a lot of sense. I hope you don’t think I was criticising your code! :)

@ Steven Clark: I’ve just been reading your post on the subject, and I have to say I think your method is excellent, especially in the way that it applies a dynamic id only to certain pre-specified pages.

Not at all - just didn’t want anyone confused as to what the sweet hell “interior” was supposed to mean ;) Just one of those naming conventions that’s evolved over the years.

Of course a base style sheet is stil there, the page specific ones would just have the necessary overrides.

I learn more and more about PHP everyday and readin posts like this and experimenting with Wordpress goes along way.

Your code snippets are unfortunate victims of an IE bug (Firefox and Opera render them correctly, of course). There is an unnecessary vertical scrollbar, which is distracting. If you feel so inclined, I have a fix for the problem.

Best regards…

What I love about WordPress is that when you think you know everything, bam comes a new idea/ Plugin/ way of doing things and blows your preconceive ideas out the window!

Please keep these ideas etc coming…

The current project just doesn’t need that level of detail, but this code is mighty compact. It’ll help a lot.

I have a lot of different templates for my site, but the opening CONTENT div is specified in the header.php. To get different classes in there, I set a global variable in my template file and simply echo this in my header.php.

So, in your template at the top, you’ll have something like this:

<?php
global $contentClass;
$contentClass = "wide";
get_header();
?>


In your header.php, you set the global variable anywhere in a php code block, but before you need to use it:

<?php
global $contentClass;
?>

Then in your header, after that global variable is called, your HTML block would be something like this:

<div id="content" class="<?php echo $contentClass;?>">


Works great and means I only need to set the class on templates that need it. Anything else will just leave the class on the content div empty.

Cheers,
Frosty
Frosty Web Designs

You rock,

Lawrence

Many thanks
Karl