Premium Theme or CSS to add features, or both?
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Hello and thanks in advance,
I created a pro-forma demo for a client wanting a business web page redesign. I used the notepad theme as it had the largest header image and otherwise allowed me to get a similar look to his existing page. After a demo, my client now wants to have 1) different header images for various top level pages. 2) custom menus in a sidebar in a top level page to view subordinate pages as well as in the default tab menu in the header (which is of course automatically generated by adding pages with subordinate pages.) His concern for #2 is that viewers will get lost and won’t remember to return to the top level page tab to get access to subordinate pages.
I searched thru many themes (free and premium) for these features but came up blank. I presume all this can be done with CSS tweaks to any existing theme, but defer to your better mastery of the subject to help me get a jump start. The “new” pro-forma blog is englishautousa.wordpress.com. The old page is at http://www.englishautousa.com. See “Facilty” tabs on home page of old site to see an example of left-side sidebar type navigation menu.
If you think I’m taking the wrong approach please feel free to suggest a better plan of attack.
chuck yahrling
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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With Notepad, it does not have the necessary classes declared in the body element to be able to do any sort of selective placement by page of header images or of sidebar items. What you want to accomplish can be done at wordpress.com, but not with the Notepad theme.
To have page-specific menus, you have to put them all into the sidebar and then selectively hide all but the correct menu by targeting pages by page ID in the CSS. Depending on how many page-specific sidebar menus you need, this can be complex, but it is doable.
The other thing to remember is that CSS is a styling document used by the browsers to position and style the elements of a web page. It cannot be used to add functionality. Functionality is all determined in the wordpress core and theme PHP script files.
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I forgot to address the premium theme. That is an option if you can find one that would give you the control you wanted, but I think that it would still require CSS since I know of no theme here – premium or not – that allows you to choose what shows in a sidebar by page.
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BTW, I love vintage British sportscars and would absolutely love to have an Austin Healy 3000.
Sigh!
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I added a custom menu of pages to the sidebar in the default template. You’re saying I can use CSS (per page) to blank out all but the parts of the menu I want to show, right? That might be an acceptable workaround. There are three top level pages that need that kind of traetment, so all the CSS coding for the sub pages might be the same as for the top
WordPress can do it, you say, but I need a new theme that supports custom headers per page, I take it. Would you happen to have any suggestions? The descriptions generally don’t go into that level of detail so I had to try several manualy before selecting notepad to get a decent header image size. I tried using the feature screener but couldn’t get it to function with “custom header” or “large header” etc. Just seems to work with easy stuff like colors, etc.
Check out my personal blog at cfytech24x7.wordpress.com and view the Sailboat Lightning Strike video, which is how I met the owner. While at ..youtube/user/cfytech24x7, watch the English Auto video which has a tour of his facility. Also, there are several cars in flickr you can get to from his old site under Galleries.
It promises to be a fun project if I can get the look he wants.
tks again
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Not exactly. Create individual menus that you want to be on the various pages and then add each one of those to a custom menu widget in the sidebar. Then you go into the CSS and the markup (XHTML) and you create CSS rules specifically for each page that hides all but the appropriate menu on that page. You do that for each individual page. You have to be very specific and target not only the page by ID, but also the menu widgets by ID. It gets a little complex, but it is just a matter of good organization and some clear thinking ahead of time. On things like this I generally will write a general outline by hand identifying which menu ID goes with which page ID. I also tend to name the individual pages to match the page name (or at least closely resemble it).
Yes, you will need a new theme that has the necessary classes in the body tag. If you are going to have to go with the Custom CSS Upgrade to get the menus the way you want them, then don’t worry about header image as that can be added with the CSS and the size changed as necessary.
I’ll check out your site and the tour of the English Auto facility. I’ve already gone through most of the images on flickr.
:-)
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Thanks very much. Thinking outside the box, I deleted the header image altogther and will just insert the appropriate images at the top of the top level pages amd make the pages sticky.
Now to find a better theme……..
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