Since I’ve launched by first Wordpress Child Theme based on Thematic I thought writing about how you can make small changes to the theme and put your own graphical logo, add css for other plugins, basically create a customized version of it.
This post is divided in 4 different parts, particularly:
Installing Wordpress Child Themes
Adding your Own Logo
Adding a standard top ad banner to your page
Creating css to style plugins that do not display perfectly on your theme
This is my first Free to Download Child Theme. It was built for a friend of mine and we decided to release it for free in hope of some extra publicity .
In order to install it you have to download the Thematic Theme (from which this child theme inherits all of the functionality), upload both themes (Byty and Thematic) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the Byty theme.
Peter over www.wordpress-how-to.com just released a 20 pages Free E-Book about how to install Wordpress. It’s taking you from downloading the latest release of Wordpress, uploading it to your site, creating a database in cPanel, installing and finally a short introduction on themes and plugins.
If you haven’t installed Wordpress before and thought about this for some time this is a good starting point because it’s simple and to the point.
I’ve just finished my first adobe air project. It was a simple Daily Incomes-Expenses desktop application with monthly reports (simple enough to build in a few hours using PHP and MySql). It took me however something like 12 hours of work mostly because of lack of documentation, certain JavaScript functions are banned in Adobe Air because of security concerns ( functions like eval() that are used in JavaScript Frameworks ) and bugs in Aptana IDE and it’s Adobe Air plugin.
To sum it all up I’ve put together a list of resources that might help you shave a few hours on you ADOBE AIR project if you are developing it using HTML and JavaScript.
I want to talk in this post about front-end interface that could be used without any modifications (or just with basic configuration) between different Content Management Systems (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine and a million more) and how this could help the developer. I know it sounds far fetch but bare with me for a minute.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Child Themes in Wordpress and how easy is to create a new theme from scratch just by building it on top of a theme framework. Ian Stewart’s blog has been a real inspiration for me in the last two months since I’ve discovered it and really brought an “AHA” moment for me. He’s been developing his Thematic theme framework for quite some time and it’s really powerful, but most of all useful.
Now, with the introduction of Wordpress 2.7 in November designers will be able to overwrite any of the master theme files, opening a hole bunch of possibilities for the professional Wordpress designer.
First of all the reason: most of my trafic comes from StumbleUpon. With that in mind I decided that it would be a really good way to promote my blog by nicely asking visitors that came from Stumble to give me a thumb up if they like the article (the all “ask and you will be given” mentality). The ideea came from stumbling on a post from Smashing Magazine which nicely asked for my “Thumb Up”.
Initially I thought that it would be even cooler to actually develop a plugin for Wordpress that did just that… Of course after 5 minutes or so of brainstorming about the technical problems of this, I realized that this was Wordpress and someone must have already developed such a useful plugin. After a quick search in the plugin directory on wordpress.org I found THE GOODWP Greet Box. Read More »
Now we take over from where we left and make the web-site fully functional. In order to do that we’ll use a few plugins to help us create a nice, functional and easy to use interface. The plugins we’ll use for this project are:
We all know how powerful Wordpress can be. A lot of people have done this before me, building static websites on Wordpress, and using it as a CMS so there is a lot of information out there. (people have written about this here and here and probably countless other places ). What I tried to do is use the power of the Thematic Wordpress Theme and simply create a nicely designed static website.
Before we start here is the project after this stage: Kraft Auto , and here are the things I wanted to implement:
simple and easy CMS for the client to use (big points for Wordpress in ease of use)
fast implementation of the web-site (since I’ll use a child theme based on Thematic that means I don’t have to create the theme from scratch, just part of the css)
a simple contact form (in part 2 of the tutorial)
a photo gallery (in part 2 of the tutorial) Read More »
I’m back from a great vacation and ready to post more interesting things. This post is about what I want to write this September. Since the hardest thing for me about blogging is starting an article, I publicly announce what I want to write about so I can put some pressure on me.
To make things short this is my plan for September:
How to use Wordpress and Thematic as a CMS - this is about the Kraft web-page that I’ve implemented and need to finish. Since it’s a presentation web-site Wordpress is powerful enough to use as a backend CMS.
First impressions about building a MagentoCommerce Theme. I’m about to start building my first Magento Custom Theme, and it should be interesting to see how things work out.
Why I need a business plan. I’ve started work with my associate on launching a new design agency and a business plan is really something we need. It doesn’t have to be something extraordinary, but I has to exist as it will help me focus on the important things and try to dismiss time wasters.
Launching a Free Wordpress Theme. I have quite a few ready made layout designs for clients that ware not accepted and I plan on developing at least one child theme based on Thematic. I was thinking on suggesting three layouts and you guys would vote on what will be transformed into a wordpress theme.
These are just some of the things I want to write about this September, and probably these will not be the only ones.
If you are particularly interested in something drop me a line and I might consider blogging about it!
I’ve mentioned in my previous post about Thematic that I want to implement a static web-page using Wordpress and Thematic as a CMS, so here’s a sneak peek: www.cozmoslabs.com/projects/kraft2 . It doesn’t have a lot of content yet, I still have to install a form builder, a photo gallery, create some more pages and perhaps a video with the clients Auto Shop, but the main template is done. And again it was so easy to implement.
I have to say this is not a child theme, because I made small changes to the header file of the Thematic theme . Other then that, the needed changes for the thematic_belowheader (for the slide show )hook were done through functions.php file.
I have to say I can’t wait for Wordpress 2.7 to implement full theme inheritance. Things will really take of then.
Away on vacation!
Finally some well deserved time off. It’s been a really interesting year for me and things appear to become even more interesting.
I’ll be away until the first of September so expect a full blog post in the first week after my vacantion on how I’ve used and implemented Wordpress and Thematic as a CMS for KraftAuto .