Modifying WordPress Themes is Tricky Business

wordpress.gif

This morning I was spending a little bit of time trying to see if I could add in a few nice section headers using the h2, h3, etc. headers. I knew from experience what I liked in the defaults, but I wanted to dive into the CSS and see if I could make them better, and more logical - like why is the first one I like h3?

Well... it turns out to be an interesting problem and because the WordPress Theme makers use these in their layout as well, it's not really up to the posts to change these. For example, h1 (in my theme) is used for the title of the page, h2 is used as the title on the post, etc. If I wanted to make an h1 for the post, I might be OK, but if I did that to h2, I'm going to have a problem with the title of the post.

So while the might have explicitly used a class="post_title" to indicate what they were doing, I can see why they chose to use the more familiar h2. After all, these are probably not modified by a ton of folks, and if they are, then, like me, you're going to see the problems and then decide how to get around them.

It's all possible to fix - but it involves essentially re-writing the entire theme and putting in the class tags to make sure that there will be no conflicts with the default post tags. Not impossible, but more work than I wanted to do today. I got what I needed - two levels, and that's going to be more than enough for what I've been doing.