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.