Kicking the Tyres
The default WordPress theme is very nice, in my opinion. However, I knew I’d have to theme a few WordPress blogs over the next month so coming up with something for this one seemed like a good idea.
The design was very easy to do. It’s a simple two column layout with a header and footer in CSS and XHTML. Once all the links and lists were cleared up it was a case of taking over to WordPress.
I remember trying to theme Invision Board and Mambo CMS a few years ago and it was a nightmare. The resulting code with a few changes was a mess and I never got something I could be proud of at the end of it. Working with WordPress has been an absolute pleasure today. Like Textpattern, it seems happy to let you set up a template file consisting of your own structure (or in this case, index.php, header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php) and insert the PHP code to do the hard work. All the CSS is your own and finding and fixing bugs is incredibly easy.
If only I could grasp Drupal’s template system as quickly.
Everything is simple black, grey and white. I’ve stuck to the default for most things, with a few icons from the Silk set. I thought it best to leave the sidebar (your honour) on every page, so have done that. I wanted to try something different for the sidebar bullets, but apparently Internet Explorer didn’t like the lower-greek list-style-type, so circle it is.
I’d love to know your thoughts… it’s not my favourite piece of “design”, but I guess it does the job for now. And it’s valid. Woot. 8-) The only bug seems to be WordPress strips the @ from my flickr URL in the navigation.
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