For the past week or so I have been working on developing my own custom wordpress theme so I could get my mind around how the template system works in WordPress. My partner Greg and I also setup an installation of wordpress on one of our sandbox servers for testing purposes, I have installed the theme there for previewing: Pleth / WordPress Sandbox (this theme will likely go away as I design other themes later on). This is a real basic theme, clean, and not a whole lot of bells and whistles so I can use it to test a lot of the Plugins that are out there. Here’s a screenshot:
(Keep in mind that my intention for this theme was to keep it really basic and to get up to speed with creating wordpress themes as I went along.)
You can click on the screenshot to download the theme to use on your wordpress blog or you can access it from this link: http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/downloads/wordpress-sandbox.zip
I learned a whole lot putting together this theme, most of my time was actually spent in the CSS portion of the site and getting all of the colors matched up for links, p content, etc.. I found a couple of good resources online that helped me get up to speed, here are some links:
- http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
- http://www.cre8d-design.com/blog/2007/01/01/useful-resources-for-creating-a-wordpress-theme/
- http://urbangiraffe.com/2005/04/12/themeguide1/
During this little self-imposed project I also had an opportunity to get up to speed with TopStyle, Layout Master, and Microsoft Expression. (which is something I was needing to do anyway)
I know that this is a really, really, really, basic theme but I sort of intended it to be this way on my first project. I have at least two or three more themes that are just about ready to launch and test over the next couple of weeks as time allows in between projects.
Nice basic template for wordpress, just what I was looking for, thanks.