Disable Changing The WordPress Theme

Updated: November 3rd, 2012 in Wordpress

The problem with having a multi-author blog is that you have a lot of users which have access to the admin area of your WordPress site.

When they have access to your admin site they have access to change everything about your blog.

Yes you can use your access roles and set the different capabilities, but what if you have multiple admin users but you only want the super admin user to be admin to change theme or plugins.

You need a way of blocking access to the themes area. You can block access to the themes screen to anyone apart from the super admin user. Below is the snippet to check the user ID and remove the themes item from the menu.
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Add New Menu Items To WordPress Admin

Updated: November 3rd, 2012 in Wordpress

If you are a plugin or theme developer then you will get to the stage where you need to add a link to your plugin or theme settings page in your WordPress admin area.

The settings page will allow you your user to customise the plugin or theme in anyway they want. There are different ways you can add links to your plugin or theme settings page. Some people like to put links to the theme settings under the appearance tab, some people prefer to create a brand new menu item in the WordPress admin area just for your theme.

If you are creating a theme I think it's better to add your link to your theme settings page under your appearance tag. This is because a theme is used for the appearance of your site and all the settings should be under the appearance tab.
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WordPress Theme CSS Starter

Updated: March 8th, 2013 in Wordpress

Creating a WordPress theme can be lots of work, but the basic HTML for themes are normally quite similar. Each theme will have a way of looping through a list of posts to show the most recent posts, or to display all the posts in a category.

The HTML to display a single post inside the single.php will mainly be the same on any theme you have the header for the title, the date for the post, the main content and then the comments section.

The thing that makes each WordPress theme different is the CSS, this will decide how the theme looks and feels. Because wordpress has functions to add in CSS to your theme you need to know what these CSS classes are so you can style your theme. In this article we are going to a have a look at the CSS classes you will find inside a WordPress theme.

You should be able to take the CSS in this article and use it as a starting point for your next WordPress theme.
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Add Search Form To A WordPress Menu

Updated: March 11th, 2013 in Wordpress

WordPress comes with the functionality to create menus in the dashboard area, from here you can select pages or custom custom menu items to make up your menu.

Menus are normally going to be display at the top of the page to give the visitor easy access to your main pages. But this top navigation bar is also a good place to have your search box so if people can't find what they are looking for then they can use your search box.
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How To Register Menus In WordPress

Updated: June 4th, 2012 in Wordpress

In a previous snippet we learnt How To Register A Sidebar In WordPress in this snippet we are going to learn how we can easily create custom menus and add them anywhere on your WordPress blog.

Create A New WordPress Menu

WordPress allows you to create your own custom menus from pages or category items. Using your theme settings you can define where certain menus can appear. For example you can create a menu for all your categories and display this at the top of your page.
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Get All WordPress Navigation Menus

Updated: March 7th, 2013 in Wordpress

If you are creating a custom themes options page or a WordPress plugin which needs to get all the WordPress menus in your site. This small function can be very useful, it will return all the WordPress menus on your site in an array so you can process them as you want.

This uses the WordPress function get_terms() to get all the nav_menu's on the site.
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Use jQuery To Highlight Active Menu Item

Updated: March 3rd, 2013 in jQuery

If you are using menus on your web designs it's a common web design technique to highlight the current page that you are on to show you where you are on the site.

This technique is normally done by adding a CSS class to the menu item to highlight it differently to the other menu items.

If your using a WordPress site then you are most likely using the WordPress function wp_nav_menu() to display the menu items. In wordpress this function will automatically add a CSS class of current_page_item to the current page.
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Paulund