Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

Wrapping up my Wordpress kick (for now), I recently did another custom wordpress theme job where I was asked to add breadcrumbs. I didn’t know how to do this and so spent a good amount of time researching. Turns out there are a few plugins out there which will do the trick, but the one that worked best for me was …

Another challenge I had when creating the Wordpress theme for Rose Edge LLC was that I needed to create a couple of custom includes, and I didn’t know how to do that. I needed a space on the sidebar where Kristin could update her Upcoming Event area. I didn’t want to have to teach her how to go into the backend code and edit sidebar.php. Next I needed a way for her to edit the “Insight Flash” that appears on her home page. I had already found a way to use the Excerpt as a secondary source of content – I needed another solution.

I am by no means a Wordpress expert, but I do use it for this site and I have built a few custom themes for others. Recently I came across an interesting problem while creating the Wordpress theme for Rose Edge LLC: I needed to have two separate content areas and Wordpress only provides one. If you look at the design, I needed my client to be able to control the content in the “highlight box” (the green box at the top) and the “content area” (the blue box below). These could not be part of the same post info because of all the code that is in between them (which defines the visual break between the two. I didn’t want my client to have to insert code into the middle of every post. What to do?

It occurred to me that Wordpress already has two ways to pull in content: The Post (called in your template with <?php the_content(); ?>) and The Excerpt (called in your template with <?php the_excerpt(); ?>). Since my client wasn’t using Wordpress as a blog, but rather as a CMS, she wasn’t using The Excerpt at all. Could she use it instead as a secondary content area? Well, yes … but not without some plugins and modifications.