In the last couple days, I’ve been getting a jones to practice my CSS skillz a bit more. But I haven’t really felt like building a whole ‘nother theme from scratch (I’ve already built two that I haven’t quite finished and never implemented–perhaps I’ll dust those off and see if somebody can help me finish them up).
In any case, my first inclination is to keep my current theme and just redo the CSS for it. Which isn’t a bad idea: I like my theme, and I like the content it provides.
But my theme is a bit complex and it’s not really designed to be modded–I’d spend most of my time trying to figure out which div is what and where what goes, the kind of stuff you know if you built the whole thing, but you’ve got to dig through if you’re modding.
So I started looking into Wordpress frameworks, stuff that’s already built and designed to built on top of. I installed the following:
Carrington JAM
Whiteboard
Blueprint
Thematic
The first three just didn’t do it for me. I want something with some good semantic class/id tags on everything so I can mark it all up w/o being confused. Most of the top themes had decent class tags but not great. For example, in a couple of them, post titles were just marked as h2s w/o any class.
To me, that just seems crazy.
Thematic, on the other hand, had scads of markup all over the place–it looked like it would be perfect.
This is awesome–you can create a ‘new’ theme using another theme as a base: WP will look in the child theme’s folder for anything new, but will fall back to the original, ie. parent, theme. Use CSS’s @import url to import the original/parent style sheet and you’ve got all of the original theme without any of the mess.
That means you can really simply make additions or changes to ANY theme you find without wrecking the original and without having to wade through somebody else’s CSS to get to where you want to be.
This is FANTASTIC. Thematic is cool because it’s built for this: it just provides a really basic framework for putting these things together, but you can use this on any theme, create a child theme almost immediately. This is going to save me some time in the long run, I guarantee it.
A Better Way to Modify WordPress Themes
In the last couple days, I’ve been getting a jones to practice my CSS skillz a bit more. But I haven’t really felt like building a whole ‘nother theme from scratch (I’ve already built two that I haven’t quite finished and never implemented–perhaps I’ll dust those off and see if somebody can help me finish them up).
In any case, my first inclination is to keep my current theme and just redo the CSS for it. Which isn’t a bad idea: I like my theme, and I like the content it provides.
But my theme is a bit complex and it’s not really designed to be modded–I’d spend most of my time trying to figure out which div is what and where what goes, the kind of stuff you know if you built the whole thing, but you’ve got to dig through if you’re modding.
So I started looking into Wordpress frameworks, stuff that’s already built and designed to built on top of. I installed the following:
The first three just didn’t do it for me. I want something with some good semantic class/id tags on everything so I can mark it all up w/o being confused. Most of the top themes had decent class tags but not great. For example, in a couple of them, post titles were just marked as h2s w/o any class.
To me, that just seems crazy.
Thematic, on the other hand, had scads of markup all over the place–it looked like it would be perfect.
And then, I read about child themes.
This is awesome–you can create a ‘new’ theme using another theme as a base: WP will look in the child theme’s folder for anything new, but will fall back to the original, ie. parent, theme. Use CSS’s @import url to import the original/parent style sheet and you’ve got all of the original theme without any of the mess.
That means you can really simply make additions or changes to ANY theme you find without wrecking the original and without having to wade through somebody else’s CSS to get to where you want to be.
This is FANTASTIC. Thematic is cool because it’s built for this: it just provides a really basic framework for putting these things together, but you can use this on any theme, create a child theme almost immediately. This is going to save me some time in the long run, I guarantee it.
WordPress Child Theme Basics