Want to recommend WP Recipe Maker as the recipe plugin to use with your recipe theme? Great idea! We try to make it as easy as possible for themes to apply their own styling to our recipe cards and end up with a beautiful combination and style.
What not to do
We see some themes targeting the WP Recipe Maker classes and then force their own styling on our recipe card, jump to recipe or print buttons using specific CSS selectors or even !important flags. This is not great as our users expect to be able to customize and style the recipe snippets (jump and print button) and recipe card using the Template Editor.
If a user builds something they like in our Template Editor but then see something different on the actual site (because the theme is adding their own styling on top) it’s a very frustrating experience.
Luckily there are other ways to achieve the recipe card look you want while still giving users the ability to customize things!
How to style the WPRM recipe parts instead
The idea of WP Recipe Maker is that we use editable templates for the different parts:
- Recipe Snippet Template (displayed at the top, usually with a jump to recipe button)
- Recipe Template (the recipe card itself)
- Recipe Roundup Item Template (used for referencing recipes in other posts, like a roundup post linking to 10 different recipes)
We give control over the layout and content of all of these templates to our users with our Template Editor. For each, some defaults are included with the plugin and those defaults can all be used as a starting point for users to further customize things.
So what a compatible theme ideally does is adding their own default template(s) that users can play around with. A template consists of an HTML and CSS file using our recipe shortcodes. Any of our default templates would be a good starting point to see how that works.
You’d add those template files in a /wprm-template/recipe/your-own-template/ folder, so they will be part of your theme and only get loaded when your theme is active. You can learn more about creating your own template here.
Even if you just want to make a few small CSS tweaks you should create your own template for that. It can be a copy of our default Chic template, for example, with a few added tweaks to the template’s .css file. This ensures you get the look you want without breaking any functionality for our users.
Interested in working together?
Do you think your theme and WP Recipe Maker would be a good match? Send an email to support@bootstrapped.ventures and we’d be happy to help you out with integrating things. Maybe we can cross-promote as well?