My first all written by me WordPress theme.
Over the past couple of days I’ve decided to redo another one of my sites- my personal work site. Over the years that I’ve owned it its seen many, many changes. Unfortunately waybackmachine.com doesn’t have any useful archives I could point to so you’ll have to trust me.
The idea of writing my own WP theme has always been daunting and I had thought about it many times before. This last time came around when I decided to write my own CMS from scratch to run my website. It worked. It was clunky and way more complicated on the backend than it needed to be. But it looked good. Mostly. When I finally came to terms with the fact that it didn’t display the way I really wanted it to I finally said “F it, lets do it right.”
I jumped on the WordPress Codex, read up on the different functions and even tried to dissect a theme just to get the basic bits. Normally this works well for me, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. After half a day of browsing Youtube and Vimeo I was able to put all the pieces together and start a theme that gimps along.
As it stands I’ve finally finished something that resembles a finished product but there is still a lot to be done. I’ve learned how much more I appreciate standards and how I wish Microsoft would follow those standards. I plan on tweaking as needed as time goes on. I’m sure there will be plenty to do. Once I actually get it working nicely, I’ll probably go through the code and CSS and make it all look pretty. Maybe learn how to put some in theme options in and see if anyone bites as a theme. And then maybe I won’t. I like the idea of having my own WP theme that I can safely assume no one else has. Does that make me selfish?
