So like I said in the previous post, when I was creating the last style for the site I was already thinking ahead about another look. The thing is, I’d developed a bit of writer’s coder’s block and whenever I tried to give this place a spring clean and a lick of paint, I’d just sit there looking at my editor and get nowhere. I’d fiddle around for a while and then go and find something else funky to do instead. I’m so rubbish getting things off the ground. I wanted to get something going using Ian Stewart’s Thematic Theme Framework but my CSS skills (well those that I possess) were a bit rusty and I’d simply do the usual screen staring for a while.
If you don’t know what Themetic is, it’s a framework upon which you pin a child theme. I haven’t touched one line of Thematic’s markup for this child theme (which is tentatively called Tamollie). The look of this site is created by my spaghetti CSS and a cobbled together functions.php file. Oh yeah with a few widgetty plugins and some Justin Tadlock stuff thrown in for good measure. Anyway this is what Ian says about his baby, Thematic:
Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.
Ian frequently posts links to new Thematic based themes on Twitter and I’d go and check them out. Some are really good and I’d think “I want one like that!“. Then I’d look at Thematic, suss out the learning curve (it’s actually not that bad) before retreating to Firefox and just bimble round t’interweb not achieving very much at all. So that’s why I decided to break the mindset and move to something else which ended up being Blueprint (BP) and Whiteboard (WB). Anyway, whilst fiddling about with BP and WB I started delving into the WordPress functions.php file to add in widget areas and what-not. That got me thinking about Thematic again because it makes use of the functions file like crazy. So as soon as I finished the last design I started mucking about with Thematic.
I decided that I’d try and create a look similar to Ian’s Themeshaper Site so that I could get used to working with Thematic and what you are looking at now is the result. At the time of writing the CSS really does look like a bowl of spaghetti but it works. I’ll tidy it up but the experience of the past few days has been me climbing that learning curve. I think I’m about a quarter of the way up it. It doesn’t look completely like Ian’s since I’m not worthy but you can see the influence .
So now that I’ve got somewhere to write again I’m going to move to stage two and attempt to mimic another site. I don’t know where yet but I’m working on it. The aim is to completely immerse myself in all things Thematic and eventually develop a child theme straight out of my own head. Well, that’s the plan anyway!
