Incorporate Cufón in WordPress

Every once in a while comes a project where using a font other than verdana, arial, trebuchet or tahoma would be nice. I recently finished a website for Tod Maffin where, Rob, the designer chose Sansa Condensed as the font of choice for headings. I could have created images for all of the page headings, but I wanted to give Tod the ability to update them if he chose to and more importantly, I also wanted to use the same font for the headings of blog posts. After reading about the alternatives, I decided to give cufón a try and was quite surprised to discover how easy it is.

Here are the steps required to integrate cufón in your wordPress site:

Step 1 – Get cufón
Visit the cufón website and download the YUI-compressed version of cufón. Save this js file in a js folder in your wordPress theme.

Step 2 – Generate your font file
Follow the steps on the Cufón website and add the generated js file to your js folder in your wordPress theme. You’ll be required to upload your font files and thus you need to have purchased them as well as verified that your fonts are legal to use in font embedding. Upload your js folder in your wordPress theme via FTP.

Step 3 – Add the code to your wordPress template
To use cufón, simply add the following lines of code to your header.php file.

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/js/cufon-yui.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/js/your_cufon_generated_font_file.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
 Cufon.replace('h1');
 Cufon.replace('h2');
</script>

These few lines of code will convert all of your h1 and h2 into my selected font. That’s it.