In case I changed the theme again, this is the 'new' look.

A few months ago my site received a much needed overhaul. I updated the structure and looks and went crazy on Googly Web 2.0 mark-up stuff. Considering I am not a webdesigner, I am quite pleased with the result.

There are probably many more non-designers like me, also looking to build their own personalised WordPress site, so I thought I’d share my experiences. This post is aimed at amateurs who want to give their personal site an own look without too much hassle.

Don’t start from scratch

The previous theme was written entirely from scratch, using a few pieces of code copied from the default TwentyTen theme. What I learned from that enterprise is that it is very hard to do everything yourself, if you’re not a professional. Many rough ends will make your theme look less tidy and your lack of skill results in a theme that is harder to navigate and read.

So, I decided to go with an often forgotten feature of WordPress theme development: child themes. The TwentyTen is a very solid base to build upon, the way it presents texts is very easy on the eyes. By using a good theme as a starting point for your child theme, you have all its advantages. Because you’re creating a child theme and not forking TwentyTen directly, updates to the original theme will automatically benefit your theme as well.

The simple start

The only file you really need is the CSS file. Create a new directory with the slug name of your theme in wp-content/themes/ and add an empty file to it named style.css. I added the following header:

/*
Theme Name: seh
Theme URI: http: //www.sensehofstede.nl/
Description: Theme for SenseHofstede.nl, child theme of Twenty Ten
Author: Sense Hofstede
Author URI: http: //www.sensehofstede.nl/about/
Template: twentyten
Version: 0.1.0
Tags: blue, white, threaded-comments, translation-ready, microformats,
custom-menu
*/

@import url("../twentyten/style.css");

With a stylesheet containing just these few lines of code, you’ve already got a working theme. It does look quite similar to TwentyTen though. But now you can start working on adapting the style. Make sure that you place all your own CSS after the @import rule, so you will override existing entries in the stylesheet of TwentyTen!

If you only want to make a few adjustments, just adding the stylesheet will do the trick. Maybe all you want are a different font and some changes to the default colour palette. If you want more, however, you will have to add PHP files.

WordPress processes child themes like this: it first looks for files in the child theme’s directory, then in the directory of its parent theme. When you don’t create a custom header.php, your theme will continue to use the TwentyTen header. This rule, however, does not apply to the important functions.php file. Every file with that name present in both the child and parent theme will be loaded, the child theme’s first. This behaviour gives you a very powerful to adapt important parts of the theme without having to create new template files.

Playing with functions

If you look to the top of this blog post you will see that underneath the title the date and time this post was published are shown. The function responsible for this is defined in a specific way that allows overriding.

if ( ! function_exists( 'twentyten_posted_on' ) ) :
function twentyten_posted_on() {
    STUFF
}
endif;

If you write your own twentyten_posted_on() function in your child theme’s function.php, TwentyTen will not try to define it again, but instead use yours. You can change more parts of the theme without having to create your own template files.

Template files

But if you want to do more, you will have to dive deeper in the code. I wanted to change my header a lot from what TwentyTen offers, so I created my own header.php file and used that. As soon as I placed it in the child theme’s directory, it replaced the default header. This can be done to replace all PHP files you find in the parent theme’s directory.

Interesting template files you could consider replacing, are loop.php and loop-single.php, which are used everywhere to display a post or lists of posts and searchform.php, which is used to display the search form when available.

Here another advantage of child themes becomes clear: you can create template files for the most common pages and leave the rarely used ones to the parent theme. Also, if WordPress decides to add a new page, your theme will automatically support it as soon as the update arrives.

Important to notice

There are some things to keep in mind while working on the child theme. By default you would use bloginfo(‘template_directory’); to print the base path when embedding images. But when you want to use images in the directory of the child theme, you will have to use bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); instead.

I wrote this post for the TwentyTen theme, but since then TwentyEleven has been published. Although it probably works just as well for the greatest part, there might be some minor differences. Also check the new template files like content-*.php.

Today I finally made some time free to have a look at the blog and decided to switch to the Mini theme. I really like the clean look and the three sidebars. The icons that are a part of this theme look much better than the previous ones.

Since I had more space in my sidebars I went looking for some more widgets. Next to some additions to the side panel I also installed some other plugins I stumbled upon. Here a list with a small description:

• Snazzy Archives, a plugin that creates a nice overview page of your archive. You can find it in the menu at the top of the page under Archive Overview.
• AJAX Shoutbox(aka Pierre’s WordSprew), the widget you can see at your right is indeed a shoutbox. Leave a message if you feel like!
• Live Blogroll, a plugin that shows the first parts of the posts on the blogs you link to when you hover over their names.Try it at the blogroll in the right sidebar.
• SEO Friendly Images, a plugin that adds and sometimes enhances both the alt and title attributes of images to make them XHTML Strict valid and improve the readability for search engines.

I’m curious to your opinions. What do you think of the new theme? Do you like the new plugins? Please leave a comment or a message in the shoutbox.

Although I didn’t find Google Analytics bad, it’s just easier to keep an eye on something that is integrated into the blog’s dashboard. Furthermore I find the way it presents the data better. I have a way better overview what blog posts attract the most attention and where my readers come from by showing the reffer URLs.

It also gave me some interesting information about what people think of my posts. So did I find this forum topic about Ultimatix at the forum of Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, a project that has strong ties with Ultimatix: http://forumubuntusoftware.info/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1365&start=70

One of the moderators of the forum found my blog post about the tool that should make the life for linux-newcomers easier: Ubuntu NL warns for Ultimatix.
He was pissed off, I could kiss his ass and should get the facts ‘strait’. Weird, I thought I just presented some facts.

After that some other users continued with this constructed criticism: criticasters of Ultimatix were cornballz, Ubuntu NL is arrogant and we arre all bashing something we don’t know a thing about. They continued with telling how great Ultimatix was; it did work, except for small things like the kernel not liking the mouse anymore or a broken Ultimatix. Fortunately that could be solved by reinstalling the system or removing the program from Synaptics and trying again. Easy!

What strikes me most is not the lack of constructive arguments or knowledge of the location of the Enter-key, but that the people who bashed the hardest were the moderators of the forum. This forum is the official support forum for Ultimatix and its staff doesn’t know how to behave or how to handle with criticism. Maybe they should read the code-of-conduct.

About them telling me to come to the forums to give feedback instead of critcizing. “What happened to being an open source community sharing and helping moto. Some people get super egos.”
First of all I’d like to say that what I posted was not just a rant on Ultimatix. It was a warning containing some detailed information on the problems, researched by members of Ubuntu NL. If I’m right some of them already have been fixed, but that’s not my problem now.
Secondly I don’t like to register on a lot of websites for things like this and I don’t see why it’s required here. I’m open to any discussion and (constructive) criticism and do not delete comments I don’t like. Reactions like this discourage me from contributing.

I hope I don’t sound too ranty, but I just would like to defend myself agains this. I have written better posts than this one, and more objective ones too, but I don’t like it when I’m attacked.
I appreciate that TheeMan tries to make Linux easier to use for newcomers, I don’t want to bash anyone. The intention of the post was to warn users for the possible dangers of the software.

EDIT: I just discovered that it works for all things. If you just add /feed/ to a WordPress url you’ll get the feet for the posts displayed at that page. That means you can also get feeds from an archive.

Oh, maybe you noticed already, but I started to write in English. I will write in Dutch sometimes, but my postings about tech-stuff will be (mainly) in English.