WordPress – Page 9

Theme Designing,Theme Destroying

Today I got a call from my nicest client whose site I have been tweaking since the spring. She wanted to tell me a few problems she was still having with the site(mostly typography issues,spacing,etc).

I felt a little guilty because I began to get these problems in line last week then dropped the ball and started working on 2 other projects. I’d also begun the migration of her site from a very simple CMS to WP. She writes a monthly column and was excited about the promise of more interaction via a blog.

The thought of absolutely iron cladding her current site’s design only to have to dive in and make her a theme for her new site kind of galled me.But she had done a recent mailing and wanted the site to look good when folks came calling… So no way to avoid the extra work. If her project was the only one on my list I think I could have done all of the improvements that same week. But I am just one little slave.

So I did the improvements and began to work on making a theme for her blog. I worked for 3 hours had dinner and worked for 3 more hours.

One tiny little thing didn’t work and I deleted the whole thing! Over 6 hours of work down the drain. I am seriously disturbed. I knew that deleting the files was rash even as I decided to do it. And I still did it. (Of course I have a similar template lying around but) I was getting close with the one I was working on, then I just wiped out.

Six hours of work.Sheesh.

WordPress Theme Viewer Madness!

I was on the phone with my pal, Sheru Arora who was telling me about a theme he liked so we clicked dashboard>>presentation>>get more themes and then navigated to the Theme Viewer and found the theme he liked. Ahhha. We decided I would to try to incorporate & blend some of it’s style (fonts, white content div , white background) and the style for the left& right side bar links in Askmen.com (black background,silvery font color) but keep the title background images red…

I may even move the navbar above the header… At least I am getting paid for this!

After I got off the phone with Sheru,I went about preparing myself for yet another theme overhaul (ate a cookie ) thus mentally prepared, I went back to the Theme Viewer to download it so I could test it out. Well, WP has done something fancy to the site and I can’t find nothing no more.

Doing a Google search for the name of the theme I found tons of people using the theme but had to look hard to find the guy who made the theme. Clicking the link to the theme in the actual theme viewer returned a file not found error.Clicking a link that Google turned up did the same.

Anyone else had problems like this in the last few hours? Because 2 hours ago the Theme Viewer looked plain but worked. Now it looks fancy and doesn’t work.

WP Tiger Admin

I decided to give a test run of Ordered List’s
redesign of the default WP admin pages. I have to say that I never had a problem with the way the default WP admin looked and functioned but I thought it looked like it might be useful to some of my clients.
Well, I really like the way the uploads page works. But probably because I am so used to the default look and feel I find everything else a little awkward .
Here I am writing this post using the code mode of the editor in a tiny little text area that floats all the way to the right instead of centered in the middle of the page. I suspect the developer wrote the code for a mac(the screenshots look like they’re from off a mac). I could probably open up the files and fix this but I have other things to do. So I am undecided if this plugin works that well. Another problem is that IE 6 doesn’t even recognize this plugin at all. Maybe IE 7 likes it better but I only use FireFox. Our computer totally freaked outwhen we tried to download IE7 (it was super freaky) which is why when I use the IE Tab FF extension I see what IE 6 sees.. But try it out for yourself. You might like it…WP Tiger Admin

It’s a fine line

Here I am calling myself a Web designer but using someone else’s theme.
Why? Because of insecurity? Well,maybe.I’m pretty new to WordPress and this is only my 3rd WordPress project.Once I got the idea that I simply had to move on from my other blogging tool I wanted to do it right away.Once again I told myself I didn’t have the time to learn the insides of WordPress, that getting the project done was more important. The funny thing is I ended up learning WP finally with this latest project. Oh, not that I am now an expert, ha ha. But I did pick a theme with out the dynamic sidebar and that wasn’t widget ready. That step was amazingly easy,by the way. But I didn’t know that until I tried it for myself.That’s a lesson right there.
I was already used to the concept of templatizing a site since I’d done it many times when using the CMS, doop. In fact, my site was basically just put together using this flat file CMS and that flat file blog; SimplePHPBlog.

Not that I overlooked the fact that a visitor coming to my site might not like the change in design flow when going from my regular site to my blog. I was never very happy with this change but I found SPB a bit daunting to say the least. And so I just lived with it.

I ended up making my own template right before I made the switch to WordPress,and might’ve gone as far as customizing the blog to look exactly like the rest of my site. But it occurred to me: why not do all that work with one of the best blog tools available? I do sometimes tend to make things harder for myself then they have to be!

I am not in any way knocking doop or SPB. They served me very well for a whole year had great support forums and at least doop kept upgrading and upgrading. I felt obligated to stick with doop since they helped me have a dynamic site back when I didn’t know how to make one for myself. They are great alternatives for anyone who can’t use a mysql connection for whatever reason.But sometimes you find you have gone as far as you can and have to move on.

So back to the theme:Activate-10
by Brian Gardner.It is a 3 column theme I converted to 2 columns. I put in a script to rotate the header/banner images.I didn’t want to use all the background images,so I didn’t.I spiffed up the font css away from px to percentages of ems.
But the layout is still not mine. It is not different enough for me to call mine.This is that fine line I mentioned. I might be tempted to claim this as my work since I did a lot of work on it myself.But it wouldn’t be right.
One should always give credit where credit is due -after all I wouldn’t much like it if in the future I saw someone using one of my themes and not giving me credit for it.