Most of you probably have been wondering what I have been doing since my promise in March to begin writing more politically. So now you are able to see what I have been working on.

I have been learning some php, css, while adding that to my limited knowledge of html to create a new WordPress theme. It is a one of a kind. The only five column in existence that I am aware of, plus it is the only one that has my coding errors. It has been a wonderful experience creating my own theme, and some of you should try it.

I should give you some of the details of how a non-programmer manged to pull this off. I started out by using the excellent tutorial offered by Urban Giraffe,in which he pulls apart all of the files and elements in Dissection of a WordPress Theme, Part I which takes you step by step through the process of understanding how WordPress works, allowing you to create your own style sheet from scratch and editing the building blocks (the loop) of WordPress to create your own theme.

Then I downloaded and setup WAMP5 for windows, just to prove that anyone can do it. I am a Linux guy myself, but this started off as an experiment in cross-platform application developement. After setting up the WAMP Server, which is very easily accomplished, I  backed up my data from the live blog site here, and installed WordPress in order to have a local working copy as my test site. I downloaded at least a dozen three and four column WordPress Themes and set up all of them just to see how others had done it, and to see the look each one offered. At first I thought I would just adapt one of them and customize it for myself, but the further I delved into the workings, I wanted something I could call my own.

So Gazette was born.

I tried Matthew Levine's excellent tutorial In Search of the Holy Grail on A List Apart, but it didn't work out for me because I could never get the sidebar on the left to keep from disappearing and reappearing in Internet Explorer. I also employed Dean Edwards IE7 javascript to make Internet Explorer render the transparent png overlay files properly.

I will be in touch with the WordPress people in a few days to see how the process works to publish the theme for others to use. I intend to make it open-source with a GNU License shortly.

I will set up a separate blog as a subdomain from Computers & Things' website and open comments there and make it available for download after it is finalized for the public.

Those interested in it as is, may contact me using the contact page on your left, and I can send you a copy.

I will go into greater detail about the layout I settled on and the plugins I use on the new space.

I hope you enjoy the new look as much as I enjoyed building it. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 11:29 am and is filed under WordPress Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Tags: WordPress Theme, Gazette, WordPress, php programming