WordPress Freelancer

Pack your WordPress theme with the necessary CSS

WordPress themes are being a great online resource for everybody to use, modify and share. This applies to GPL themes only though. However, in order to offer our online neighbors good themes that they will be happy using, theme developers, including me, should take care of some peculiar aspects in themes such as the use of CSS code. Along with WordPress theme evolution, some default CSS code needs to be included in very theme so that certain in-built features work well. This is mostly the case of images, but not only.

In WordPress 2.5 several classes for aligning images and block elements like DIV, P, TABLE etc. were introduced.Every theme should have these CSS classes – you can alter the style if need – in its style.css. The same classes are used to align images that have a caption, introduced in WordPress 2.6. Three additional CSS classes are needed for the captions, together the alignment and caption classes are:

.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.alignleft {
float: left;
}
.alignright {
float: right;
}
.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
/* optional rounded corners for browsers that support it */
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}
.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}
.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

Additionally, there are a few more WordPress CSS classes that you may optionally wish to style because WordPress generates them by default. I make use of most of them in my themes and I suggest very body uses them in their themes. There they are:

.categories {...}
.cat-item {...}
.current-cat {...}
.current-cat-parent {...}
.pagenav {...}
.page_item {..}
.current_page_item {..}
.current_page_parent {..}
.widget {...}
.widget_text {..}
.blogroll {...}
.linkcat{...}

Did you find this information helpful? Do you have anything else to add? Your opinion is very much appreciated.

CSS