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August 11, 2008
In the last segment of the WordPress and BANS Integrations Series, I walked through the files that are needed to integrate the two individual content systems. Understanding the role of these files are important, as you can begin to visualize how the entire theme starts coming together on the BANS side. In this post, I am going to try to clarify that picture to help understand better.
The most important thing to keep in mind as you continue learning this process is my goal of keeping both BANS and WordPress working independently and separate of each other in case you ever decide to make a change on your site, or one of the two needs to be updated!
The Way BANS Works
The easiest way for me to get you to visualize what the header & footer files do, is by looking at how BANS works for us. The TRUE meat and potatoes of Build a Niche Store are the ebay listings right? I mean, without the listings… you basically have nothing but a menu and a bunch of ads.
Part of what makes Build a Niche Store so great for design purposes is that the layout is really made up of only 4 main files. There are other files that do other stuff, but for the purpose of layout, these are the ones we need to think of. I have listed them in the order they display in front of you on a working site…
The key file in the list above is the one file that shows the products, or index.php. In order to merge the BANS Template within a wordpress theme, we need to get everything from the WP theme to show in the header and footer files, without disruption of the index.php .
A VERY Basic view of the way a template works:
Of course, I realize this image is very basic, but as you start visualizing a page with sidebars, you can see where the header ends and the footer begins.
What about the Menus and Sidebars thingy?
We all know that in order to make our site functional, we also need menus. The menus are called as a function of the application through the header or footer files. They are placed at whichever point in the code we want them to show by using the <get menu> (not exact code) variable. The key thing however, is that we only need to modify our header or footer file to change the place they are displayed.
Common Layouts (Click to enlarge)
By clicking on the images, you can see how the header and footer files carry the load of the layout. The sidebar and other elements are embedded within the files.
By viewing the files above, you can start seeing how the header and footer files are used to pull the entire layout into one screen.
Tomorrow, I am going to disassemble the the files on the Hybrid Auction site and explain how to put it all back together with your header and footer files.
Mark
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