WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Adding Theme Support for Built-In Features

The WordPress core offers a number of great tools that can be easily added to a theme to give the theme more customization options. WordPress provides you with several built-in features that give you the ability to enhance your site and theme. This section covers five of the most popular features, including:

• Custom navigation menus
• Custom post types
• Custom taxonomies
• Post formats
• Featured images

Each of these features are part of the WordPress core; however, they aren't activated by default. When we say that you're “adding theme support,” what we mean is that you are activating a built-in feature in your theme. Therefore, when you're travelling around the WordPress community, whether it's in a support forum or at a WordCamp event, and you hear someone say the theme supports a certain feature, you can smile because you know exactly what he is talking about.

Activating support for these features in the theme you are using involves a few steps:

• Core Function: Add support for the feature in your theme by including the core function in your theme's Theme Functions template file (functions.php).
• Template Function: Add the necessary function tags in your theme template(s) to display the features on your Web site.
• Templates: In some cases, you can create feature-specific templates to create enhancements to your site.

The following sections take you through each feature. You add the core function to your theme, add the function tags to your ...