Styling of WordPress post titles

Since the beginning of time (well, for a long time), I’ve always wanted to do something like this with my WordPress post titles:

You see, the italicised of. Or you may want to change the typeface, the colour, or style in some other way. I posted about this on Twitter and, as usual, about four million kind souls replied with their solutions.

So, how is it done? I chose to go with the brilliantly powerful custom fields. I also use these to display different header images for ILT, and alternative background images and colours on this site.

Step one: on your edit post page, just create a new custom field like so:

Then open your single.php in your themes [wp-content/themes/your_theme] folder, and find where it outputs the title of the post, and replace with something like:


<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title_attribute() ?>">
<?php
$altitle = (get_post_meta($post->ID, "custom_title", true));
if($altitle !="") echo $altitle;
else the_title_attribute() ?>
</a></h2>

Perhaps this could be improved. Anyone? This solution works for me because it enables me to style post titles per post.

If you’d like a plugin solution, then check out Kari’s Title Style from the WordPress plugin directory. I’m using it on this site.

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Special thanks to @essenmitsosse and the myriad others who replied to my original tweet.

Afterthought: I wonder how you could get my above hack to work in Thematic?