EightyOne

Progress is slow to non-existant because I’m suffering from creative block (AKA lazyness). So far I’ve done a little styling on a plain theme that I’ve applied to the ghost-blog of my chum, Dan Stevens.

So far, setting up the theme has been almost as easy as setting up a stylesheet. In addition to your stylesheet, though, you have to create at least one template file, which forms the markup. This is essentially setting up an XHTML file with added custom PHP tags to insert the blog posts and information. e.g.

the_title()

This template I’ve split in to three files — header.php, footer.php and index.php. This will allow me to re-use the header and footer, whilst providing customised versions of the main content to suit the front page, individual posts and archives, for example.

The most useful concept to get to grips with is the WordPress ‘Loop‘. This is the portion of code responsible for looping through posts, and repeatedly inserting the desired markup.

"France and England are like an old married couple who often think of killing each other, but would never dream of divorcing." — Former Europe minister Denis MacShane

Incroyable, but true … France’s 1956 bid to unite with Britain — Guardian Unlimited

This blog was my first foray in to the world of WordPress, and when a Left Hand Red site redesign was on the cards, I decided to implement WordPress on there so that the other band members could post news easily (the original was a static, hand-coded affair), adapting the existing design for use as a template. At the same time, I knew that I could completely redesign the site without having to edit any of the content simply by creating another WordPress theme.

We decided some time ago that the existing design had served its purpose, and that it was time for a change to something that better fits the band’s current sound and the image we want to project. So, I’ll be developing a new theme from the ground up, and documenting some of the process on this site as I go.