Using and Basic CSS to Customize Your WordPress Theme

1. firebug Usingand Basic CSS to Customize Your WordPress Theme Intro Course

2. First- a little about me • My name is Laura Hartwig and I’m a developer for the MarkNet Group in Brewster NY. (MarkNetGroup.com) I started working with WordPress in 2011 and have been in love with it ever since. I’m a co-organizer of my local WordPressMeetup group and a frequent contributor to the WordPress.org forums. • I will give out the link to these slides at the end of the presentation, so no need to write anything down.

3. We’ll Discuss For a limited time only • Basic CSS Terms & Usage • What is Firebug • How to Install It • How to Use It

4. What is CSS? Within your page editor, you can control your text by making it bold, italicized, left justified, etc, but you cannot control the overall look and colors of the site. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are what control the look of your website. That is controlled in the style.css file.

5. We will talk more about how to access that file in just a minute. But first, let’s talk about firebug

6. What is Firebug? A free web development tool available as an extension in Chrome or Firefox browsers. It allows you to see the HTML and CSS while viewing any website. It also allows you to do many other cool things, but for the purpose of this talk, we are going to keep it simple and stick to HTML and CSS.

7. What’s So Great About Firebug? • It allows you to preview and test HTML and CSS changes on your site without touching your code. • It allows you to make changes yourself without paying a developer. • Even if you know CSS, it can save a lot of back and forth time. • It’s a good way to debug errors or problems. • Sooo much easier than “View Source”. • And…

8. IT’S ABSOLUTELY FREE No Cost No Monthly Payments No Hidden Fees No Kidding

9. How to Install Firebug And it can be yours now Visit https://getfirebug.com/ in your Firefox browser and click on Once installed, you will need to restart your browser for it to show. If you prefer to use Google Chrome, you can install the Chrome extension here: https://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/chrome/, but I find that the Chrome version doesn’t work quite as well.

10. Using Firebug First, you will want to open Firebug by pressing F12 on your keyboard or right clicking on your Firefox browser window and using the dropdown menu to select “Inspect Element with Firebug” Note: It is supposed to create an icon in your toolbar, but that has never worked for me.

11. Once you open Firebug, you will get a window like this on half your screen. I like to use the new window button to create a separate window.

12. The default is to show HTML on the left side. Add CSS on the right side.

13. Click the + or – boxes to expand or collapse the elements You will see your site is composed of what we call “divs” or divisions in CSS. Each separate division can be expanded or collapsed in the Firebug window.

14. CSS Tip: So you will see this in the Firebug window: Divisions will always be identified by either a “class” or an “id”. Classes are noted by periods in the CSS style sheet and ID’s are noted by the number sign. So it would look like this: .wrap #title-area Notice how it says div And you will see this in your style sheet:

15. And Now the Magic…

16. Click on the inspect icon to see the sections of your webpage.

17. You will be able to see the HTML This can be very helpful in WordPress where pages are generated automatically with PHP. Some of these things you will never see when you are editing your pages so Firebug allows you to see the generated text, and also makes it easier to find what you are looking for by highlighting those areas on the front of your site.

18. You can see as you hover over the site, it highlights the corresponding HTML in the Firebug window. As you hover over the HTML in the Firebug window, it highlights the corresponding elements on the website.

19. CSS Tip: Box Model If you’re not familiar with the box model, basically, every element on your site is in a box.

20. So when you hover over the HTML in the Firebug window, you will be able to see the box model elements on your website The blue section is the main section (or div). The purple section shows the padding. The narrow gray line shows the border The yellow section shows the margin

21. You can also see this by changing the second window to the Layout tab

22. Editing the HTML in Firebug Simply click on the inspect element icon and then hover over what you want to change to easily find it in the Firebug HTML window. Then select it in the Firebug window, double click, edit, and enter. This will NOT change the HTML on your site. It will only show you what the changed HTML will look like.

23. Editing the CSS in Firebug Again, simply click the inspect element icon and highlight want you want to change, then click on it in the Firebug panel and type in your changes. Again, this will NOT change the CSS on your site. It will only show you what the changed CSS will look like.

24. Editing the Actual CSS Now that you’ve seen the wonderful changes you can make in Firebug, you’ll want to make those changes permanent on your site. To do that you will need to find your style.css file which we discussed earlier.

25. Word of Warning Before making any changes to your files backup backup backup I cannot stress enough how important it is to make a backup of your files. Use a v1, v2, v3 at the end so you can revert to previous versions.

26. To find your style sheet, you need to go into the WordPress dashboard and choose Appearance > Editor It will default to the style.css file

27. It is possible that you will have other style sheets here. Just click on the file name to select the different files. I highly recommend that you don’t touch the php files unless you really know what you are doing. This could cause the

28. Word of Warning If you are not using a custom or child theme, you will need to install a Custom CSS plugin. If you are not sure if you have a custom or child theme, install the plugin just in case. You can find this plugin by going to Plugins > Add New and typing “Custom CSS” into the search bar

30. Once you install this plugin, you will simply be adding your new CSS code to the blank page provided instead of making changes to your style.css file. Still very easy.

32. Find the Style Sheet If you will be actually editing your Child Theme files instead of using the Custom CSS Plugin, you will need to know which files to edit. You can find that information by hovering over the file name here: In this example, they are all coming from the same style sheet, but sometimes they will be different.

33. Then you can find that file here: The main style sheet file should always be named style.css Notice that sometimes files have names above them in bold but the file name is under in parentheses.

34. Let’s Go Over Some Basic CSS Firebug makes it very easy even if you don’t know CSS. Most things you can guess what they mean. The most common things you will be working with are : font-size font-family color width And these are all exactly what they sound like.

35. Keep in mind that…

36. Changing colors

37. colors If you’re not a designer and don’t have Photoshop at your disposal, a good FREE color tool is ColorPic, which can be found here: http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/ Simply download it to your desktop and it will allow you to choose any color from a website or even your desktop. You can even save your favorite colors to use again later.

38. Be Careful to Check What Other Things You Will Be Changing When You Change Your CSS CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, which means the rules that you set will affect your entire site, so unlike making changes in the HTML, when you change one thing, it will could change many things throughout your site.

39. So, say I wanted to change the color of the “Leave a Comment” link on my site. I use Firebug to find it and I change the color… But now the links in my sidebar change color too!

40. So in order to select only the area I want, I need to be more specific with the CSS classes I use. You saw in that example that I changed this: a, a:visited, #navli.right a:hover, h2 a:hover, #footer a:hover To change the color of my text, but you can see this is selecting quite a few different classes. Each different thing is separated by a comma, so here we are selecting at least different things. 1 2 3 5 4 5

41. And you’ll notice with the a selector, there are several different versions of it. We have it with :visited, with :hover, and finally with #footer a:hover. Now, if I tell you that a is a link, you can guess that adding :visited on the end means that it is a link that has been visited and :hover means that it is a link that is being hovered over.

42. And we can go further to say that #footer a:hover Is only the links in the footer section that are being hovered over. So, if we want to change only some links and not ALL the links on the website, we need to be more specific, similar to the way this last one controls only links in the footer that are hovered over.

43. So, if we look at what we’ve got, we will notice that the link we are trying to change is within the post-info division We’ve already got the .post-info class here, so let’s just add that a at the end so it will control the links in the post-info area.

44. Now you can see that just these top links change and the sidebar and the link below it are unaffected.

45. Changing background colors

46. Changing the Background Color Usually to change your background color, you will need to find your body. However, sometimes there is also an inner wrap or content area that you will want to change.

47. Moving the Sidebar Another common request is to change the sidebar to the other side. It’s really very simple. Just use Firebug to find your content area and your sidebar area and reverse their float.

48. Change the width of either area the same way. Be aware that if the total of the two areas is wider than your total body width, one of these areas will drop down to the bottom and you will only see one of them.

49. Fixing Margins

50. Fixing Image Margins Occasionally I’ll run into a poorly designed theme that hasn’t taken into account image margin, so your text will be right up against your image when you left align an image, and it will just look bad. That’s easy to fix by adding some margin.