This could be useful for targetting certain users, admin for example.

Generally with WordPress templates you have index.php for the homepage, and single.php for each individual post. Some themes, including mine, separate this even further and have another template post.php included from the single.php template.

Regardless of whether further templates are used, the layout tends to be like this:

<div class=”post”>
 <div class=”post-title”><h2>Title</h2></div>
 <div class=”post-content”>Content Here</div>
 <div class=”post-bottom”>Posted by …</div>
</div>

With the introduction of WP-2.7 (Strayhorn), the new function post_class() was added, a very useful function. So this part…

<div class=”post”>

…now becomes…

<div <?php post_class(); ?>>

The post_class() function adds in all the necessary classes for each post, such as the category (if you post in the all category, the post_class() function adds the category-all class to the post div).

To modify this to add the name of the article’s author as a class to the div holding the post, you add in this bit of code and modify the post_class() as follows:

<?php $curauth = get_userdata(intval($post->post_author)); ?>

<div <?php post_class($curauth->user_login) ?>>

So that is very straightforward and from that point onwards the theme can customise posts for known/given users, such as admin, this might be useful on multi-author blogs.

My first example is keeping most of the default login page intact. I only altered the login box itself – you can find it on my own personal blog. As you can see the box is altered and the image from the famous painting ‘The Son of Man‘ (which is part of my blog’s theme) is there; note that this isn’t there on IE versions of 6 and below. Example below (click to go to the actual login page):

This only required a little alteration – making the form fit inside a restraining div I had added to the default wp-login.php page.

The second example is a bit more complex, but shows how easily the wordpress login page can be configured.

The theme itself is a four column theme, and so to keep the general feeling the theme was extended to the login page over at Balanced News Blog (the link is to the login page). The standard login page (wp-login.php) was modified by adding the header, menu, and sidebars so it fits in with the theme. As you can see though, the message part that is common to all login pages, giving a link back to the main page, has been removed. Example below (click to go to the actual login page):

So as you can see, given the two examples, customising a login page for WordPress isn’t beyond a designer’s grasp. If you are interested in having your blog’s login page customised, drop me a line and let’s talk!