I recently mentioned that I started a new project for TopCommentator.com. This project will take me a while to get off the ground (I'm guessing a bit longer than the week or two I predicted ) but the first decision I made was to use the Darkzen WordPress theme. It's a nice clean theme with ad space integrated into it, and after browsing the free themes directory it's the one that I happiest to go ahead with as a base for this project.

One of the first things I looked at was how to edit the existing ads in the theme. I saw this question asked in the support forums so decided to make a post from it. So here goes:

1. In your root web space locate sidebar.php under root\wp-content\themes\darkzen (see note at bottom if you prefer to do this within WordPress dashboard)

2. Open sidebar.php and search for advertarea. You will then see where the ads are places as below (click on the image to see full size):

3. Change the # in href="#" to the url that you want to point your ad to (shown in red below). Overwrite the images /images/advert1.jpg under root\wp-content\themes\darkzen\images folder in your web space (shown in blue). Alternatively, you can place a new image in your images folder and change the code to point to the name of this new image. Finally update the alternative text field alt="advert1" (shown in green) to something suitable for the description of your ad.

4. If you add or remove some advertisements (the Darkzen theme comes with 6 ads as default) you can add or remove lines of code (shown in pink above) and update the fields to appropriate values as described in steps 1 to 3.

5. To update the banner in the header you'll need to search for the headright class in header.php and follow steps 1 to 3 to update the ad.jpg image and other fields.

Note: You'll need access to your web space to overwrite existing or add new images. To edit files from within WordPress navigate to Appearance >> Editor from within the WordPress dashboard and click on the theme file on the right hand side of the page.

If you found this helpful or have any feedback or questions please feel free to drop me a comment and I'll try to get back asap.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.