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up vote 7 down vote favorite
2

currently, I use CSS specificity to override plugin styles. I prefer this to editing the plugin as it makes for less headaches when you update.

What would be nice is if my style sheet loaded after the plugins, so that I only have to be as specific, not more. This would make my stylesheets much prettier.

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

As you suggest, the most elegant approach is when your CSS overrides are loaded after the CSS injected by the plugins. This is quite easy to achieve - you just need to make sure that your header.php calls wp_head() before it references your style sheet:

<head>
    <!-- all the usual preamble stuff goes here -->

    <?php wp_head(); ?>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" />
</head>
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Hey, that's a really nice solution Tim. – DigitalSea Jan 9 '11 at 4:56
Great idea, so simple!! It does assume the plugins use wp_head, but I can't think why any wouldn't. – Mild Fuzz Jan 10 '11 at 11:09
And what if I'm using a child theme? I don't like to override the header.php of my parent theme. – Jules Nov 7 '12 at 10:10
up vote 9 down vote

There are several ways plugins can handle CSS.

  • best case: plugin queues CSS and provides option to disable it (disable it, copy CSS code to your stylesheet and be happy);
  • good case: plugins hooks function that queues style (unhook function, hook your own with mods if needed);
  • usual case: plugin queues CSS directly. See How to dequeue a script? (applies to styles as well). Short version - there will be dequeue function in future WP release, for now could work around with wp_deregister_*
  • bad case: plugin echoes CSS among bunch of other things. Case by case...

Overall in my opinion it is better and easier to disable separate stylesheets and incorporate them in your own to minimize issues and improve performance (less files to fetch).

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up vote 1 down vote

I save a copy of the "not willing" plugin CSS to the theme folder and import it into the theme css by adding

@import url('name-of-the-plugin-css.css');

to it (replacing, of course, the name of the .css by the one I'm injecting). Then I modify the css copy in the theme folder and save it to server as I do for the other files. Oh, yes, sometimes it may be necessary to "nail" the IDs or classes altered by assigning them an "!important".

I do not know if this is state of the art, but it does no harm and works just fine.

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up vote 0 down vote

Another quite elegant way is to use specificity of CSS.

So if the css of the plugin says:

div.product div.images img {
  ......
}

you define in your css:

body div.product div.images img {
  ......
}

Also see the answer of Michael Rader for a similar question: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/36411/6417

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