Me, WordPress and Template tags

Recently I have been working more diligently on putting some finishing touches on my personal blog’s theme. Working on a local machine is so much easier now that I understand how it works. I remember when I started out with PHP it was painful.

I got frustrated because I didn’t know where the files had to go at first, the changes I had made to the configuration weren’t taking effect and random little things that almost discouraged me from continuing.

The other day I was reading on the WordPress forums seeing if there was somebody I could help. One thing leads to another and I wind up looking at frameworks, plugins and template tags. Now, I have posted something pretty similar to this before because it was a bit of a rant when I saw somebody posting code I felt was not good practice but that is besides the point at the moment.

What I really want to get to is why I’m writing about template tags. They are an extremely useful thing to know – to some. WordPress has several template tags at your disposal and I love it. There are however some that I have seen in some themes that I would love to use in some of my themes down the road.

A perfect example is using a template tag for navigational links. WordPress has a really good template tag:

< ?php posts_nav_link(); ?>

Simple. It does the job: create navigational links for more posts. I feel the downside to that is that it is all in one container. Yes, there are ways around it by creating your own template tag (which a lot of people seem to do) and use that instead. But what to use? I like the Kubrick method of navigational links where rather than using the one

post_nav_links()

you use two in one. Creating a previous and next link is easy. A better way of doing this is if you are using just the bare minimum amount of files in a WordPress theme is using conditionals to create the navigational links for certain looks.

< ?php
/* Create page navigation and post navigation
 * depending on what is being viewed.
 */
if ( is_single() ) { ?>
  

    
< ?php previous_post_link(); ?>
    
< ?php next_post_link(); ?>
  
< ?php } else { ?>

    
< ?php previous_posts_link(); ?>
    
< ?php next_posts_link(); ?>
  
< ?php } // end else statement

The little snippet works fairly decent but it is a little cluttered. It can be simplified a little more so that the only things that change are the

<

div>s containing the actual links. So we can modify it to:

< ?php
/* Create page navigation and post navigation
 * depending on what is being viewed.
 */

  < ?php if ( is_single() ) : ?>
    
< ?php previous_post_link(); ?>
    
< ?php next_post_link(); ?>
  < ?php else : ?>
    
< ?php previous_posts_link(); ?>
    
< ?php next_posts_link(); ?>
  < ?php endif; ?>

Now we don't repeat code and saves some processing power for other things. Amazing what cutting down two lines of code will do! Now we can wrap all that into a function and use it as a template tag to make things easier in an

index.php

file. So the final code would look something like:

/* Create page navigation and post navigation
 * depending on what is being viewed.
 */

function my_theme_nav_links() { ?>
  

    < ?php if ( is_single() ) : ?>
      
< ?php previous_post_link(); ?>
      
< ?php next_post_link(); ?>
    < ?php else : ?>
      
< ?php previous_posts_link(); ?>
      
< ?php next_posts_link(); ?>
    < ?php endif; ?>
  
< ?php }; // end my_theme_nav_links() 

Now we can use the function anywhere in our theme for post navigation.