Using Bloginfo to Build a Custom Theme for WordPress
When you build a custom theme in WordPress that you would eventually like to share with the WordPress community, you can’t hard code certain elements like the blog’s name or images links. I know most coders use things like <a href="../link.php"> or <a href="images/pic.jpg"> but those might not work properly if your WordPress install is not in the root directory or if you are on a category page.
WordPress has a very useful tag that you might have seen around if you’ve ever taken a look at the source code of any theme. It’s called bloginfo and it solves a lot of problems for programmers. Here are some examples of how you would use it.
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
This will bring up the name of the blog as entered under the Settings => General page in the admin. This tag should be used when coding the header to display the name of the blog.
<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
This will display the description of the blog as entered under the Settings => General page in the admin. This tag should be used somewhere in the header to display the blog’s description.
<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>
This will get you the URL of where WordPress has been installed, no matter if it’s in the root directory or a sub-directory. This is great for linking to certain pages or to link back to the home page.
<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>
This tag is a life saver when developing custom themes. It brings back the location of where your custom theme’s folder has been installed. Life became a whole lot easier when I discovered this tag. It’s extremely useful when developing a custom theme if you need to link to a secondary stylesheet or display an image stored in the images directory of your custom theme.
How do I edit the font color for the bloginfo description that shows up at the top of my page?
Hey Sean,
You have to edit that in your theme’s style.css file and add your colours and styles there. If you send me a link to your site I can get more specific with what exactly you need to do.
hi. informative article
Well…..I agree with most of the things you said. Anyway, thanks!
Thanks for sharing this useful info.
I’ve been looking for an explaination of these basic tags. Thanks for your help. Maybe now I can modify my theme.
Very interesting information that might be developed again, thank you i get good article
There is one little gotcha – Other than displaying text you can’t assume bloginfo() is like echoing a string in functions e.g. parse_url(bloginfo(‘template_url’)) will just never work, but you must use get_bloginfo(‘template_url’).
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very useful article on wordpress Bloginfo object