Lately I've been putting a lot of hours into developing a couple of sites using the
WordPress and
WPMU platforms. These platforms are a solid starting point for pulling a content/post based site together relatively quickly - the wealth of useful plugins also helps reduce the chance of you having to re-invent the wheel.
Having said that there is still a lot to do to create a professional website that has it's own look and feel - much of this can be achieved by creating a custom theme.
If you are creating a custom theme you will probably need to link to multiple elements within that theme's directory structure. The most common approach to do this is somthing like this:
<img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/myimage.png">
<?php
echo '<img src="'.get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory').'/images/myimage.png">';
?>I've certainly been using a lot of the latter style, until today.
I decided to clean up my code a bit and put the following line at the top of my theme's functions.php file:
<?php
if(!defined('WP_THEME_URL')) {
define( 'WP_THEME_URL', get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'));
}
?>Then I replaced all the
get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') instances with the constant
WP_THEME_URL. Now my code is a lot more readable and there is less typing.
<img src="<?php echo WP_THEME_URL; ?>/images/myimage.png">
<?php
echo '<img src="'.WP_THEME_URL.'/images/myimage.png">';
?>Using a
constant like this should provide a slight performance increase here too - I haven't done any performance tests, but the current
get_bloginfo() process is a fairly convoluted chain of function calls.
Note: Just in case the WP platform does start using this constant in the future, the constant's value is not set if it is already defined.
UPDATE:
After this post was made I discovered WordPress defines a TEMPLATEPATH constant, but no constant currently exists for the TEMPLATEURL.
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