One small change you can make to a wordpress blog is taking advantage of a custom font. There are several ways to accomplish this, using SiFR, TTFT, Cufon, as well as some other plugins.  On this blog I am using Cufon, which I prefer – we will go over how to use that in another post.   In this article I want to go over using TTFTitles to help a fellow blogger, Cindi from Moomette’s Magnificents implement it in her blog.

To start you need to download and install TTFTitles, you can get it here or search from the “add plugins” page within your admin.  Once you have downloaded and installed it you may need to set certain directories as write-able, and the admin page of ttft will tell you if you need to do so.   Now you need to upload the font you would like to use for your post titles.  Some of my favorite places to get free fonts are DaFont, and Fonts for Peas.

To upload a new font just go to “appearance > TTFTitles” then choose ‘fonts’ (this is also where it will warn you if your directory is not set up correctly.  Just browse for the font you just downloaded and then hit the upload button. (see screenshot)

As long as your fonts directory is set up correctly you should now see the font listed on this page.  Now you need to set the style of the font for it to display on your site properly.  Just click on the link that says “styles” at the top of the fonts page and you will come to a page with a default style already set up.  (see screenshots below)  You now need to click on “Add new Style” and choose the font you uploaded from the drop down on this page.  Setting the styles as you want them on your site.  You can easily adjust these later by coming back to the styles page and hitting ‘edit style’ next to the style you created.

Ok, so you created a new style with the font you uploaded, choose the sizes and colors and hit save- right?  Now back on the “fonts” page you need to set your new style as the default- there will be a link over on the right side that says just that- “make default”.  Now you still have some work to do to make your font show up on your blog.  No worries, I have screenshots for that too!

To add the custom font to your theme you will need to use a text editor and FTP if you know how to do so, otherwise go to “appearance > Edit” and choose the page you would like your title to be replaced. (usually the index.php or the single.php pages to start)

You can find these instructions on the “usage” page of the TTFT plugin, for easy reference and advanced usage, as this article is only explaining how to use the default style you set as you post title text.  You can also set this up to replace sidebar titles and more once you get the hang of it.

From within your edit page code (for this example I am using the index.php code), you are going to find the code that calls the headline title, there are sometimes two instances- one right after another, the last one being followed by < / a >. In that example you would change the SECOND  the_title(); to read the_ttftitle(); This is because the first instance of the_title() calls the LINK to the title, and the second instance actually changes it over. (See the screenshot below for another example)

Now you save the changes and go back to your page and refresh to see how it looks, at this point you may need to go back to the styles tab and modify the size and colors to better suit your theme. You will repeat these steps anywhere you want the ‘title’ to be replaced (archive pages, search pages, pages, single posts, etc.) You can see this in use on my Letters to Breathe site.