Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme – Part 1 “The Loop”
Let me say it for the millionth time “content is king” and we all know that, don’t we?
Since content is the most important part of a site, your WordPress powered theme must emphasis on content presentation. Most cookie cutter themes come with a post list that runs based on the time your posts were published, in other words a chronological list of posts irrespective of its importance. Let’s face it, not all posts are created equal. Some posts are special, some are important and then some not quite so. Why then should all posts get the same treatment?
Magazine styled themes do a fine job of addressing this by introducing the featured posts option. Posts of a certain category got “top of the page” real-estate, which helps the site highlight the more important content.
Creating such category specific presentation on demand requires both PHP script manipulation within the WordPress Loop and some changes to the CSS stylesheet. In continuing with the series on dissecting magazine style themes, we will attempt three hacks that will allow you to do the following:
- Create a featured post that is displayed at the very top of the page, followed by regular posts; all of which happens taking into consideration the pagination aspects of the site so as to not repeat the featured post on every paginated page.
- Create a simple featured and non-featured posts distinction using minimal PHP hack, keeping it simple enough so as to not worry about pagination.
- Create asides to highlight useful bits of information without hogging potentially critical presentation real-estate, or in other words, creating non-intrusive side posts without using a plugin.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
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August 18th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
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August 18th, 2008 at 4:40 am
[...] Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme – Part 1 “The Loop” No quite sure how the wordpress loop works yet? Try checking out this article and you should have better idea of how to use the above 1001 wordpress loops. How to make a random post button This simple tutorial by WP Guy teaches you how to add a random post function into your sidebar. [...]
July 31st, 2008 at 3:51 pm
@ Chico
One loop can display posts from X and then Y, use this method from Codex.
To display archives on a monthly basis try using a plugin such as this.
July 31st, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hi
I have been looking around for good examples of multiple loops use in WP.
I am desperately trying to make something similar work for my blog. My desired setup would have:
On front page, the latest post from categoryX, followed by the latest post from categoryY then two lists outside the loop ( I think ) with the top 5 rated articles in one and the 5 most viewed posts in the other. Both of these lists would be generated by plugins (and repetition of posts not an issue on the frontpage which would not show posts in the loop after the two featured ones)
However in my archives page I would need to show all posts grouped by month.
Any help/tip/idea to modify the code above for my needs would be immensely appreciated.
C.
p.s I realise my request is similar to previous comment but still need help.