A template tag is code that instructs WordPress to “do” or “get” something. There are various tags that make a template work, or display data to your visitors.

For example: <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> will display the name of your blog. This tag is used mostly in the header, which is where you see on top of the page.

Template tags are extensive and not all of them must be used when you are creating a custom theme. You can find all of the tags at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

When creating your custom wordpress theme just remember that the tags you include decide the fate of your end-user so include them wisely. Wouldn’t it suck if you accidentally forgot to include the categories tag? Nobody will be able to find your posts!

Customizing wordpress themes at first is a hard task in your mind. You see all of this code and you need to figure out what makes the cms work and what is filler design.

When you are starting with a custom design that you created with photoshop and constructed with notepad or dreamweaver you can start with a blank wordpress theme then you will be happy knowing that the code involved is minimal. You just have to copy and paste the php code into your template within the right areas.

You also have many resources to work with including the theme docs, also known as template tags, on wordpress.org itself. These are just small bits of php code that tells wordpress what to display on your design template.

In addition to the standard tags you will want to make sure you widgetize your theme so you can easily add functionality to your blog site using the administration rather than chopping through code in the future. Be sure to style your widgets accordingly or it will look different from your design. You can find the styling for the widgets in the wp-includes/widgets.php file. You will notice an area where it says before widget and after widget. This is where your widget calls the style from via classes in your style.css file.

If all else fails and you get confused, we currently develop custom wordpress themes for a mere $350.00 so don’t be afraid to ask (if you are reading this at a much later date then this price may have moved up).

If you do not own or rent your own dedicated server then you may come across an issue when you try to include a url. The issue comes when your hosting company has it disbaled in the php.ini file.

There are alot of hosting companies that have the global setting disabled but allow you to have a local php.ini file. If this is the case then you can change the setting by adding a php.ini to your main directory such as public_html. In this case you would add the allow_url_fopen = 1 to the php.ini file.

You can also setup your SAFE_MODE options this way. Sometimes hosting companies limit the local changes you can make so some of the options may not work with a local php.ini.

Joomla is a well known cms (content management system) and it is GPL licensed. If you are not familiar with GPL then you can read more at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

The GPL license means basically that the software is free to use and distribute as-is. It is used by many developers because the cms is already coded. It just needs to be customized to look like the client’s company brand.

The Joomla system uses what you call modules. These modules add to the functionality of the website. In Joomla, the modules allow you to add content on the website where you want it to display. Sometimes you come across an issue with a module where you would need to change the way it looks, or functions. For example, there is a module called ds-syndicate that provides advanced rss feed functionality to the Joomla system. Unfortunately it displays the dynamic url of the Joomla feed. We recently has a customer who needed that feed link to point to the rss from the integrated wordpress blog design that we created for them. In order to change that feed url we had to change the hard-coding of that module because the url is hard-coded as the standard Joomla rss url. The module admin would not allow us to change that dynamically. To do that we would have had to provide additional programming to customize that module.

To add new static content to the sidebar of Joomla we had to install an additional module which allows you to post any html code and place it where we wanted it. It is still called dynamically but it was not a standard module in the release of Joomla.

Joomla offers many modules that you can download and use. You just have to look for them sometimes. If you are a web developer then this will save you costs without sacrificing quality and allow you to pass the savings to the customer.