Preface

This easy-to-use guide will walk you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional enhancements and features, specially tailored to take advantage of the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build several custom jQuery solutions for various types of hypothetical clients and also show you how to create a jQuery and Wordpress plugin.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started: WordPress and jQuery...This chapter introduces the reader to the core fundamentals that they need to be familiar with in order to get the most out of the book. HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript syntax, and how to recognize the various parts of those syntaxes are covered, as well as a list of "tools of the trade" which covers what features their code editor, browser, and even image editor should have. The chapter also illustrates exactly how CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery work in the browser with the HTML served up from the WordPress site.

Chapter 2, Working with jQuery in WordPress...This chapter goes into the details of how to start working with jQuery specifically within WordPress. It covers how to properly include jQuery using the Script API and focuses on jQuery's selectors (very important for working in WordPress) as well as jQuery's top functions.

Chapter 3, Digging Deeper: Understanding jQuery and WordPress Together...This chapter takes the reader to a deeper level and introduces them to all the ways that jQuery can be applied to a WordPress site: Through a custom script in the WordPress theme, as a jQuery plugin called in through the theme, and lastly, as a custom jQuery script or plugin applied to a WordPress plugin! The ways to affect a WordPress site with jQuery are numerous, and the pros and cons of each method is considered so that the reader can assess their own projects accurately. The chapter also introduces the reader to their first "hypothetical client" and covers how to create their own jQuery plugin and then wrap that jQuery plugin into a WordPress plugin so that a site administrator could easily implement the enhancement without having to know how to edit the theme.

Chapter 4, Doing a Lot More with Less: Making Use of Plugins for Both jQuery and WordPress...You thought you learned quite a bit in Chapter 3? Hang on to your mouse. You're about to embark on a nice little project that requires you getting familiar with the popular jQuery plugin Colorbox, as well as the popular WordPress plugin Cforms II and mashing the two with your own custom jQuery magic to whip up some slick event registration that will knock a client's socks off.

Chapter 5, jQuery Animation within WordPress...If you're going to use jQuery, you might as well really use it to its fullest, which means animation. This chapter covers using jQuery's animation functions and shortcuts to create some sharp, well timed visual enhancements that grab the site user's attention as well as create a super slick navigation enhancement and an awesome rotating slideshow of sticky posts.

Chapter 6, WordPress and jQuery's UI...Now that we have some animation chops under our belt, we can make that work even easier by using jQuery's UI plugin which includes the Easing and Color plugins we learned about in Chapter 5. In this chapter, we're going to also take advantage of the UI plugin's widgets and events features to create some super useful interfaces in our WordPress site.

Chapter 7, AJAX with jQuery and WordPress...This chapter introduces you to what AJAX is and isn't along with the top ways to get started using AJAX techniques in your WordPress site; you'll load in HTML from other pages on your site, get your tweets and favorite flickr pictures pulled in through JSON, and last but not least, custom AJAXing the built in WordPress comment form.

Chapter 8, Tips and Tricks for Working with jQuery and WordPress...This chapter covers the top tips and tricks for getting the most out of jQuery specifically within WordPress. Most of these best practices are covered throughout the title but in this chapter we take a look at exactly why they're so important, espeically within the context of WordPress and how to implement them.

Appendix A, jQuery and WordPress Reference Guide...Dog-ear this appendix and consider it your "cheat sheet". Once you work your way through the book, why waste time hunting and pecking your way back through it to recall some function's bit of syntax and what its parameters are? This book extracts the most important information about jQuery and WordPress and breaks it down into an easy-to-skim reference guide so that you can easily find the syntax for most jQuery selectors, remind yourself of the top jQuery functions that you'll need for most WordPress development and their parameters, as well as helpful WordPress template tags and API functions and other useful WordPress know-how such as structuring the Loop and the Theme Template Hierarchy.

What you need for this book

• WordPress (2.9.2 or 3.0)

• The jQuery library (1.4.2)

• A web server (local WAMP or MAMP installation or hosted by a provider)

• A web browser (Firefox or better)

• A good code or HTML editor

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who is interested in using jQuery with a WordPress site. It's assumed that most readers will be WordPress developers with a pretty good understanding of PHP or JavaScript programming and at the very least, experience with HTML/CSS development who want to learn how to quickly apply jQuery to their WordPress projects.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery("document").ready(function(){
jQuery("p").css("background-color", "#ff6600");
});
</script>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery("document").ready(function(){
jQuery("p").css("background-color", "#ff6600");
});
</script>

For for clarity and conciseness, many code examples in this title are extracted. An extracted block of code is set as follows:

...
jQuery("p").css("background-color", "#ff6600");
}
...

Code and markup preceded and ended with ellipses "..." are extracted from the full context of code and/or a larger body of code and markup. Please refer to the downloadable code bundle to see the entire work.

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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