I have a wordpress blog and I would like to make a custom design myself...
I dont want to pay a bunch of money for a company to make it for me
Why are the templates broken into a bunch of different files?
What are some tutorials you know of on how to make wp themes/templates?
Thanks
-Techy
1 minute of googling:
So you want to create WordPress themes huh?
Also: Word press templates are probably split into multiple files because parts of the theme are re-used on multiple pages. For example, if you want to change how the side bar looks you only have to change it in once place instead of on the main page, archive, and detail pages.
A lot of websites do this, it is a theme in computer software all together, it's called Don't Repeat Yourself (look it up on wiki).
another option is to use a theme framework. it becomes your main theme, and you create a CHILD THEME, with your desired style. I'd say that, if you are going to learn how to create a theme from scratch, learn how to work with a theme framework instead. They are a high quality base you can use as a starting point, are easier to work with, and are here to stay. Not to mention that once you get the hang of building child themes, building a second completely different theme will be much faster than starting another theme from scratch.
i prefer HYBRID, but there are comparisons of the main theme frameworks here:
http://www.wptavern.com/comparisons-between-most-popular-theme-frameworks,
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/27/wordpress-theme-development-frameworks/
if you are going to build it from scratch, here is a PSD starting point:
http://www.area381.com/2007/07/10/wordpress-psd-framework/
If you're experienced in PHP, HTML and CSS it's quite easy to create your own WP Templates
To get you started
So you want to create WordPress themes huh?
Build a Basic Newspaper style layout with Wordpress and jQuery
I found both tutorials to be the best resources to build your own customized template.
I would like to point 5 videos from CSS Tricks that helped me creating my 1st WP theme. And then 2 more about the subject.
Video 25: Designing for Wordpress: Part I
Video 26: Designing for Wordpress: Part II
Video 27: Designing for Wordpress: Part III
Video 41: WordPress as a CMS
Video 65: Advanced Uses for Custom Fields in WordPress
Related
I have been trying to develop my first WordPress theme. When I added a theme "primer" and started customizing it, it appears as an image.
The primer theme appearing as shown not as it is shown in demo
Can you give a little more detail. Normally themes are generally blank and often never look like the picture. Its up to you to use the themes composer, purchase a composer if your theme does not have one, or hand codde the site only using the theme for an overall look. For instance my theme I use a mix. I installed it and got a blank theme. I then used the composer to add elements and build out the page. Some themes even offer templates which is likely what you saw when you bought the theme. Your theme should have some sort of templates for free or premium templates for purchase you can add on top of your theme to get a prebuilt layout. I would highly enocourage watching a few youtube videos over themes and customizations and using envato.com to our advantage. Wordpress is a beast most people dont realize. Its not a change words and done. There are multiple other sites for that. I just finished my first one and its a bear. It take patience creativity and a basic understanding of Wordpress to operate, and some coding experience would greatly benefit to.
I have developed a website's "index.html" with all the sections (header, content, footer, etc) made with Bootstrap 3.
It is meant to be the "design" to show to the user.
Now I have to port it to make it a Wordpress theme (because we are using Wordpress).
This is the first time and I have to do it quick,
Does Wordpress offer a base skeleton to apply my HTML sections and CSS/JS? I mean just a "blank" theme, maybe object oriented (like Symfony).
Thanks
Yes. You can use starter themes to make your work easy and quick.
Find a list of starter themes below:
http://underscores.me/
https://roots.io/sage/
http://themble.com/bones/
The first one is my favourite though. But feel free to try them all out and make your pick.
Take a look at the WordPress Template Hierarchy; Will do u a lot of good:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy
I hope this is not too basic to be off-topic, but I am wondering to what extent it is possible to customize WordPress to fit an existing design. I have a design in mind and read somewhere (WordPress manuals?) that it is possible to only manage a small part of a website with WordPress and then slowly migrate the whole site to be WordPress-managed. If one would like to preserve a certain design, is this preferred to tweaking WordPress templates? That is to say, should I start from a website and slowly move into WordPress, or should I start from the WordPress template, and try to tweak it until I arrive at the design I want. Are there any examples of WordPress sites, which fall into light-weight (but image heavy) websites, which exhibit freedom from the WordPress mold? (Is this too vague?)
Generally speaking, I think it makes more sense to start with WordPress from the start if that is what you intend to use at the end. It will be much easier to transition your site into being fully WordPress-managed after you have some small piece of it in WordPress. This is because, while a lot of the design will fit easily into the HTML WordPress with only minor tweaks, WordPress theming is kind of a specific subcategory of its own, and there will be less of a barrier to moving if your start with CSS that is compatible with WordPress.
WordPress also makes it easy to override individual page nodes, so the static portions of your site can be part of WordPress in a very loose sense, and you'll have full control over the markup. It is less to start writing your markup knowing what you've already had to do to get your design to work with WordPress than to transition to WordPress later.
If you are new to WordPress theming, here are some links to get you started:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
http://themeshaper.com/2009/06/22/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial/
Your approach depends on the technical capabilities of you to setup two sites that live next to each other.
In general, you'll have to modify Wordpretss theme to fit your design. I prefer something of a skeleton theme - http://themehybrid.com/themes Skeleton/Hybrid one. The thing about this approach is that you'll have to build your design from ground up and fit it into Wordpress way of doing things. Wordpress likes to output HTML with additional CSS styles and it's usually much easier to use those elements then to modify them to fit yours.
My personal choice, I'd start using WordPress right away, learn as much as I can about the CMS aspects, you have great tutorials at WP101 (dot) com then move to create or built your own templates. I'd suggest you first start with a simple template like Twenty Ten and modify it then perhaps you can use Responsive which is my favorite or many others. This 2 sites for example were built in WP
http://www.philiphousenyc.com/ and
http://www.danielhopwood.com/
Good Luck,
Mike
Thing I plan to do is to make many websites based on Drupal core.
All of these websites will be quite small, but there will be many of them (in matter of hundreds).
I'm working on this with one HTML / CSS coder, guy who should make themes for every website we make.
He doesn't know much of a PHP (enough for PHPTemplateEngine tho) therefor I what I want is to make as little interaction between me and him as possible. He shouldn't touch PHP part of themes, I shouldn't touch HTML part of themes.
My question is:
Can you tell me what structure of theme folder should I use, what's your opinion of Zen theme for beginning of Drupal theming and how can I make automatic JavaScript and CSS loading script for themes?
Also I'd greatly appreciate any tips concerning multi-site Drupal setup, best practices and so on.
Thanks in advance.
With regards to drupal theming you have a couple of options:
If all the themes will share 98% of the same code base and just have different classes etc to style it visually different (say a different heading colour), then you can get away with one drupal theme and use theme settings to alter the configuration of the theme on each site. This has the advantage of having to maintain only one code base. Zen can still be used as a base theme if you wish
Another option is one you have mentioned above, in which you have a base theme which declares all inherited code, and sub themes to which override specific parts of the base theme to create the necessary effects. I would suggest that this is the better option if your themes vary wildly from one site to another. There is a administrative burden with this option though, as say you have 100 sites, you could potentially have 100 sub-themes to maintain and provide fixes for.
I got the design (PSD) from client. Which should i choose to make custom Wordpress themes.
I should use any Wordpress theme
Framework?
or Any WordpressBlank theme?
or I should find similar free theme
to my design then edit to it
I can't say for sure without knowing your PSD. It depends.
If the layout from your PSD is too specific, I would go for a blank theme.
If it's a well known 3 column pattern for example that you don't need to create any customization whatsover, I would use a Wordpress Theme Framework.
I would never try to find a free theme and edit it, mainly because:
you need to read it's licenses and usually attribute properly with a link in your project (bad option when you're doing something for a client);
usually it's more work to adapt a theme instead of creating from scratch. I would adapt a theme only if 80% of it would be already equal to my PSD requirements.
I agree with the other comment. I've used all 3 methods: framework, pre-made, and blank themes, and I've found that using a blank theme is the easiest when starting from a PSD file. I've used Chris Coyier's blank theme (http://digwp.com/2010/02/blank-wordpress-theme/), which is a bare bones theme with the basic functionality of a WordPress theme, but no CSS styling, making it easier to add your own markup. I wrote a blog post about this, comparing the differences among blank themes, frameworks, and pre-made themes (http://www.sinawiwebdesign.com/blog/topics/wordpress/use-wordpress-framework-or-blank-theme/).
When I build themes starting from a PSD file, I first write the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code to get a working prototype, and then I convert it to WordPress using a blank theme. I copy and paste most of my code directly into the blank theme with little modification, then add some code for custom menus, widget areas, support for post thumbnails, etc.