When you create a Wordpress theme you need to add comments to the top of the stylesheet so that Wordpress will understand that this is the main stylesheet for your theme. The information that will be placed in the comments of the stylesheet are:
-
Theme Name
-
Theme URI
-
Description
-
Author
-
Author URI
-
Version
-
Tags
-
License
/*
Theme Name: Twenty Ten
Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/
Description: The 2010 default theme for WordPress.
Author: wordpressdotorg
Author URI: http://wordpress.org/
Version: 1.0
Tags: black, blue, white, two-columns, fixed-width, custom-header, custom-background, threaded-comments, sticky-post, translation-ready, microformats, rtl-language-support, editor-style, custom-menu (optional)
License:
License URI:
General comments (optional).
*/
This will provide Wordpress all the details of the theme that it needs. Wordpress will use this data in the theme admin screen to give the user as much information as they need to define the themes they want to choose. But this information in stylesheet can also be information to the theme developer. For example if you are creating a theme options page and want to display the name of the theme then you can use the name you have defined in the style. ## Before Wordpress 3.4
Wordpress has an inbuilt function to get the information inside the theme comments in the stylesheet, this function is called get_theme_data().
<?php get_theme_data( $theme_filename ); ?>
The parameter you need pass into is the path to your themes stylesheet theme_path/style.css
. This will return an array with all the data available in the stylesheet.
$theme_name = 'twentyeleven';
$theme_data = get_theme_data( get_theme_root() . '/' . $theme_name . '/style.css' );
echo $theme_data['Title'];
echo $theme_data['Author'];
After Wordpress 3.4
The above function get_theme_data() as off Wordpress 3.4 has been deprecated and you will need to change any of your existing plugins/themes that use this function. It has been replaced by the Wordpress function wp_get_theme() which will return the new object WP_Theme
. You can use it to get the same variable as before but it is done with an object and not an array.
$theme = wp_get_theme( );
Then you can use this object to display all the information of the current theme.
// Theme name
echo $theme->name;
// Theme title
echo $theme->title;
// Theme version
echo $theme->version;
// Get parent theme name
echo $theme->parent_theme;
// Get the path to the template directory
echo $theme->template_dir;
// Get the path to the stylesheet
echo $theme->stylesheet_dir;
// Get the template directory name
echo $theme->template;
// Get the stylesheet directory name
echo $theme->stylesheet;
// Return the URL to the screenshot
echo $theme->screenshot;
// Get the theme description
echo $theme->description;
// Get the theme author name
echo $theme->author;
// Get the theme tags
echo $theme->tags;