Part 1: Getting everything set up

Luckily for us, with a little WordPress and jQuery knowledge under our belt, this task is not as complicated as it sounds. In the last chapter, I extolled the virtues of keeping design and functionality separate and wrapping your jQuery enhancements in WordPress plugins. I also mentioned the fact that there are always exceptions. Well, here's a scenario where we'll be inclined to apply our enhancements directly to the theme for a couple of reasons:

• We'll already be tweaking the theme to create a custom category page for events

• And, we'll also need to create a custom page template for the form that can load into a modal box without reloading the rest of the site's headers and footers

Because these requests require that the client understand they'll need to take care if they ever want to update or swap out their theme, we might as well leverage the full power the WordPress theme API can provide us for this enhancement.

What we'll need

Let's start with the main...