Curtis Henson

When setting up themes I like to give people options, lots of options, some say too many options. Those options usually come in the form of widget ready areas for WordPress themes. There are widgets for just about everything now, and more being developed everyday. You could even make your own widget. With so many types of widgets an easy way to make your theme customizable is to “widgetize” areas.

My Checkmate theme has 10 widget areas! With that many places to stuff widgets things can start to get confusing. I’ve adopted an easy way of not only clueing in end users of where the widget area is but also keeping the code easy to read.
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When I started building wordpress themes PHP and most of the advanced wordpress functions went over my head. I’ve learned quite a bit since then, but one step taught me a lot about wordpress and PHP. While I was coding my premium wordpress theme I decided to make a very simple related posts widget. There are plenty of plugins that do this but I wanted to learn about writing widgets and further my PHP and I had a pretty good idea on how to do it, so I did it.

Functions.php

I suspect most people creating themes never even create a functions file, much less know what it does. Used correctly it can be a very powerful tool. This is how advanced theme authors Continue Reading