Alex Hardy

… and in with the new. Behold, my first crack at a WordPress theme .

It took me a little longer than I originally estimated. This is mainly because I’ve found more enjoyable things to do with my spare time this last week than editing PHP and CSS files. An “About Me” section with a colophon will follow soon.

I’ve gone for Simple with this version and haven’t been too ambitious where it came to dissecting the code. Inevitably you have to get your hands a bit mucky to achieve what you want, so here’s a rundown of the main things I’ve done:

• There’s nothing at all to be gained by changing all the ids and classes in the theme to match those that are used in the site’s main CSS file. I cleared out the theme’s CSS file and reassigned the styles I’d created to the existing hooks.
• Inserted my navigation block and the Mint JS include into ‘header.php’.
• Inserted my footer block into ‘footer.php’.
• I’m using Automattic’s sidebar widgets, with the following tweaks:
  • Added span tags (for CSS image replacement) around the ‘Archives’ and ‘Categories’ titles in ‘/wp-content/plugins/widgets/widgets.php’.
  • Linked to my RSS feed around the ‘Recent Posts’ title in the same file.
  • Added my little buddy badges to ’sidebar.php’
• I added the get_sidebar() function to ’single.php’, so it would be viewable on post pages.
• Minor tweaks to ‘comments.php’ and ‘404.php’.

I’ve tested this theme under Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera so I’m satisfied that it works well.

I’ve got ideas for my first redesign already though, which I intend to start work on once Refresh is up and running.

Posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 1:51 pm under Design. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.