Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme – Part 1 "The Loop"

Sunny — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:31:20 +0000

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.

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Anatomy of a Magazine Style Premium WordPress Theme – Part 1 "The Loop"