When talking about the difference in themes and plugins, it’s common for those involved in building projects for WordPress to know that functionality is usually left to plugins and that presentation is left to themes.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t some cross-pollination (or perhaps cross-contamination? :) where plugins introduce visual effects and themes offer more functionality than they probably should, but as a rule of thumb, I think it serves us well.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if we don’t think hard enough about what the presentation of content actually means when it comes to designing themes. Continue reading

With tomorrow being arguably one of the largest holidays in the world, I thought that it might be a decent change of pace of the posts and offer up something a little bit shorter and a little more open ended in hopes of getting some feedback from the rest of you WordPress designers, developers, bloggers, and other users.

So here’s the deal: Back when you first became acquainted with WordPress, you started at ground zero. We all did.

Sure, there might have been a few things that we knew – like how blogging work, or how HTML and PHP worked together, but we weren’t necessarily familiar with WordPress templating nor the WordPress API (or any part of the API for that matter). Continue reading

One of the neater trends that we’re seeing in WordPress themes is that we’re able to introduce tabbed content into a single page when leveraging front-end frameworks – like Bootstrap or Foundation – so you can load up all of the content in a single request and not have to use outdated elements like iframe.

For example, say that you have an index template like this:

• The template includes the usual header information
• There’s a content area that’s composed of tabbed navigation (where each tab is a menu item)
• When the user clicks on a menu item, it brings the corresponding content to the activate state and hides the other content
• It then includes whatever other widgetized areas and footer content necessary for completing the page

It’s pretty cool when it’s executed correctly. Though I’m not saying I have the definitive way to go about doing this in WordPress, here’s what I’ve found to be most effective.

Continue reading