ChristinaHooper

# September 11, 2012 at 6:12 pm

Is there any way that anyone knows of to pull this off:

I have:

What I want is to change the background of body to blue IF the div inside it has a class of blue. Same principle if it’s red, green, yellow, etc.

Does anyone know of a way to accomplish that?

Hugo Giraudel

# September 11, 2012 at 6:13 pm

No way in CSS. We can’t target a parent with pure CSS yet.

ChristinaHooper

# September 11, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Is there a way with javascript or jquery?

ChristinaHooper

# September 11, 2012 at 6:16 pm

I’m doing this in a WordPress Theme if that makes a difference…

TheDoc

# September 11, 2012 at 6:19 pm

No problem with jQuery. Would look something like this:

if( $(‘#target’).hasClass(‘blue’) ) {
$(document.body).addClass(‘yellow’);
}

Then in your CSS you would have your styles for `.blue` and `.yellow`.

Andy Howells

# September 11, 2012 at 6:26 pm

Yeah – I wish there was a parent selector in CSS but sadly not – Chris did an article on it – http://css-tricks.com/parent-selectors-in-css/

Regarding your problem – TheDoc is pretty much on the money that JQuery has your back.

I just did something for an accordion that adds a class to the parent, relevant part;

$(this).parent().addClass("active");

You could do something like that.

ChristinaHooper

# September 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm

I have got to be doing something wrong. Here’s what I have:

In Header.php inside the head tag I put:

In my page.php, I have:

ChristinaHooper

# September 11, 2012 at 6:31 pm

well – apparently I can’t figure out how to do code blocks in the new forum either… one of those days – I have my if statement wrapped in script tags, and it removed them.

Andy Howells

# September 11, 2012 at 6:53 pm

I assume you need to add ‘.row .blue’ (make sure to use the periods!) rather than ‘row blue’ – that might be where the problem is coming from.

ChristinaHooper

# September 11, 2012 at 9:53 pm

That didn’t work either… hmmm…

theacefes

# September 11, 2012 at 10:47 pm

http://codepen.io/katbella5/pen/pxutd

No need for periods. The jQuery docs say they aren’t needed.

Make sure you are calling the jQuery library properly. I think that is likely your issue.

-Kat

P.S.: In other exciting news, that was my first CodePen! Yay.

TheDoc

# September 12, 2012 at 12:54 am

Also, it’s generally best practice to make sure you IDs and classes are lowercase. There is *some* preference to using camelCase out there, but I think the industry standard is lowercase with hyphens.

So it your example:

`#ContentRow` would become `#content-row` and `.Blue` would be `.blue`, etc.

You don’t need to add periods when using `.hasClass()`. It also doesn’t play very nicely with multiple class names, they have to be in the proper order. So if you do `.hasClass(‘first second’)` but the element on the page is actually `class=”second first”` then hasClass() will return `false`.

Here’s an example for you: http://jsfiddle.net/e6kE3/

TheDoc

# September 12, 2012 at 12:56 am

Having said all of that, @theacefes is probably correct – you might be trying use jQuery before the library is included. You might also want to wrap your code in something like this:

$(document).ready(function() {
// your code here
});

theacefes

# September 12, 2012 at 2:25 am

I work for a company that uses .NET so we’re all about Camel Case. I started off using underscores though.

http://css-tricks.com/poll-results-hyphens-underscores-or-camelcase/

It’s from a while ago, but still interesting.

TheDoc

# September 12, 2012 at 2:35 am

camelCase certainly has its place! I think it’s all about what language you are using.

JS/PHP – camelCase
HTML/CSS – hyphens / underscores