POST FORMATS

By Megan Goodson

WHAT ARE THEY?

Post formats are a theme feature that came out in

WordPress 3.1 that allow a user to format each post

differently based on the type of content.

They are like Tumblr’s post formats on their

blogging interface.

HOW TO FIND THEM

To find them, log into your WP Dashboard and go to

Posts, Add New. If they are supported and enabled in

your theme you will see a little box that looks like this:

USING POST FORMATS

You have to put this code into your theme’s function.php to enable

support for Post Formats.

If you are using WordPress’s theme Twenty Eleven it’s already

there. But if you want to add in the rest of the post formats you have

to edit it.

LIST OF POST FORMATS

Image

Link

Aside

Chat

Gallery

Quote

Standard

Video

Audio

Status

NOTICE

You can NOT make your own post types.

You can only use the ones that come with the theme.

You CAN edit the styles of the post types.

Not all themes can support post types. (Example:

Hybrid does not.)

POST FORMATS: ASIDE

An aside is usually a short entry and is published

without a title.

POST FORMATS: AUDIO

An audio format is meant for a single audio clip or a song.

POST FORMATS: CHAT

A chat format is supposed to be for a few lines of a chat

from an instant message session with a friend or a family

member (or anyone).

POST FORMATS: GALLERY

This format is for a collection of images using a gallery format.

POST FORMATS: LINK

A post that holds a single link.

POST FORMATS: QUOTE

These posts are great just for putting an inspirational quote down.

POST FORMATS: STANDARD

This is the standard WordPress post type.

POST FORMATS: STATUS

This post type sort of resembles a Facebook status post.

POST FORMATS: VIDEO

This post type is meant for posting a video clip.

STYLING YOUR POST FORMATS

What, you thought they came styled? That’s

way too easy!

YOU ARE USING THEM BUT THEY LOOK HORRIBLE…

Ick – this isn’t that appealing.

LET’S STYLE OUR OWN

I played around with the PHP and styles and here is one

I came up with.

Remember: You can only *style* the formats, you can NOT make up your own post formats yet.

HOW DID I DO IT?

It’s basically the same structure every time.

There are a few basic classes you have to edit in

the template file and sometimes rearrange a couple

of divs (and delete elements you don’t want) and

finally maybe a couple of tweaks to the functions.php

file.

I will get into more detail in the next few slides.

ORIGINAL CODE

WHAT WE WANT TO WORRY AB OUT

CHANGING CODE

This line right here gives the entire post it’s class. So I named mine ‘aside_container’

The updated line should look like this, given of course your class will be your name and not mine

CHANGING CODE

After you edit that, the rest of the div’s are simple.

For every “entry-classname” you see just replace it with

the postypename-classname.

Example: entry-content will now be aside-content

NOTE: only change element classes on the elements you

want to change. If you only want to style the header then

just change the entry-header. Otherwise you will have to

remember to style them all.

EXAMPLE

Change to: “aside-title”

Change to: “aside-format” and I went ahead and changed the string after that as well. But you would change this to whatever format you are using (i.e link, gallery, etc)

Change to: “aside-summary”Change to: “aside-content”Change to: “aside-meta”

FINAL CODE

ASIDE TEMPLATE STYLED

STYLING LINK FORMAT

This is going to be the same process as the aside

format.

The only real difference is in the styling.

REMEMBER – Only change the classes you want to

style or need to style.

Compare your content-link.php to content-

aside.php and try to match up everything.

CONTENT-L INK.PHP CODE

LINK FORMAT STYLED

STYLING VIDEO FORMAT

Styling the video format can be either easy or

complicated it just depends what kind of styling you

want.

For example purposes I am going to make it as

simple as possible.

However, online there are many articles on how to

style video formats, so if you want to go further, I

suggest you go online and see what is out there.

NOTICE

Twenty Eleven does NOT have a content-video.php

template.

So we have to make one.

It’s not very hard all you need to do is duplicate

one of the templates. I duplicated the links template.

Then all you do is change everything once again to

video-elementname.

V I D E O T E M P L AT E C O D E

VIDEO FORMAT STYLED

EDITING PHP

So far we’ve been editing just the HTML around the code with

one or two tweaks to the php code but nothing too drastic.

We’re about to dive in to the drastic editing.

Two things to remember:

*****ALWAYS MAKE A BACK UP OF YOUR FILES *****

DO NOT edit this if you don’t want to. This is just

personal taste.

MISSING A COMMENT L INK?

I’m sure you’ve all noticed this one chunk of code

that has been commented out.

I did it on purpose because I didn’t feel like we

needed two comment links.

THE CHUNK OF CODE

Commenting it out, I got rid of the reply bubble and I left

the “leave a reply”.

I didn’t delete it just incase I decided that I wanted it later.

REARRANGING META DATA

To customize this further I also decided that I

wanted to change up the date and the reply link. In

my code I found the PHP the code and played around

with it.

I personally just deleted mine because I knew for

certain that I definitely did not want it back.

ORIGINAL CODE

The arrows above are what we are going to edit. 1. The class “sep” just means separator. It’s what separates the comments link from the

date. So DELETE that line to get rid of the separator. 2. I changed the ‘leave a reply’ to just ‘reply’ you can put anything you want in between

the ‘ ’ for the comment link to say whatever you want. (It could say “to the Batcave”) 3. The last line is the edit post link. I personally thought it was in the way, so I deleted

that line as well.

NEW CODE

Above is the new code and it makes the layout look a bit better for what I was going for.

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHERS?

The other post type formats can be edited the same

way.

There needs to be a template.php file for each

format you want to edit/change.

There is ***NO*** styling on the original format

types. So if you want it to look different you HAVE to

edit it.

CONCLUSION

Post Formats are fun!

You can NOT create your own at the moment (this

could very well and probably will change with one of

the newest updates)

You CAN only STYLE the formats as we did in the

slides before.

Have fun and make your WordPress more to your

taste!