From Shoe to WordPress Theme

You know how easy it is to switch themes in WordPress, right? Click Appearance > Themes and then activate the new one you want. Simple. Give me something that easy to switch around and I’m going to use it. A lot.

I’ve been wanting to mess with creating a child-theme using the new WordPress default theme, twentyten for a while now. I didn’t really have anything specific in mind, but wanted to go through the process to get myself familiar with it.

For those who may not know what a child-theme is, it’s a way to use an existing theme as a base while overriding the pieces that you want to change with your own elements. The great part is, you can change as much or as little as you want. Making your edits in your own child theme makes it simple to upgrade the parent theme down the line.

So how does a shoe become a theme?

Last week I bought a pair of old-school Vans that have this cool white stitching. I liked the look and that was enough to kick start the idea for my theme. There’s no better way to learn something than by diving in and trying it out and now that I had an idea in mind, it was time to dig in.

There are already a bunch of theme frameworks available specifically designed for using as a base for child themes. I made the decision to use the new twentyten theme as my base as I knew it already had many of the basic design elements I wanted. Personally, if I was going to use a theme framework, I’d likely go with the Genesis Framework from Studiopress.

What I learned during the process

• Creating a child theme is ridiculously simple.
  I won’t bother you with a tutorial here, but if you want to learn more about how-to, the tutorial at op111.net is pretty solid.
• Me and CSS are not friends.
  If you want to develop themes these days, you need to know CSS. But seriously, the stuff just pisses me off at every turn. If it was up to me, I’d just use tables to lay out the theme. But that didn’t go over well.
• I really enjoy the development process.
  I have been building websites for over 15 years and one thing that never gets old is the feeling I get when hit save on a file, open a browser and first see my work come to life. I’m not even talking about the whole site all at once. I’m talking about the detail work. Tweak this or that, hit save, refresh the page and Bang, there is your little slice of success.

I don’t think I’m 100% finished with the theme. I think there are still some things I’d like to tweak. It’s not winning any awards, but I’m really liking the new theme.

Credit where due

I owe a ton of thanks to Shayne for his help with the new theme. Every time I ran in to a CSS issue I wasn’t able to solve, Shayne was there to get me back on track. Have you ever heard the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? I proved that over and over again this weekend. Thanks, Shayne.