Stylehack

In this article we will discuss the housekeeping steps you must perform before you make any modifications to a theme — creating a copy of the theme being modified and making the files “writable” so that you can use the WordPress Theme Editor. For a general review of how your blog is generated by PHP, please read Part 1 of this Series.

IMPORTANT:   For the purpose of this series of tutorials, I’ll be using the WP 2.5.1 DEFAULT template for all examples.

Creating a Copy of the Theme

You should never make major modifications to a theme without making a new working copy of that theme! [I define major as anything other than things like font color or other minor modifications to general styling.]

The reason I say this is primarily because you need a backup copy of the theme you can refer back to if something goes wrong during the modification process. The other reason is also related to potential problems — you need a fallback, the ability to put things back the way they were with a single click “just in case”.

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This series of articles assumes you have at least basic XHTML and CSS skills, and little-to-no PHP skills.

One thing I get asked about quite a bit is how to customize (modify) an existing theme, in particular without using widgets. Basically the questions fall into 4 main categories:

• Changing the Header Image
• Modifying the Footer Content
• Changing text labels
• Modifying the Sidebar

Before we can jump into making any theme modifications, you need to understand how the sections of a post-related page are generated. This might seem a little more technical than you want to get, but trust me… it will make it all that much easier when you actually begin modifying a theme.

IMPORTANT:   For the purpose of this series of tutorials, I’ll be using the WP 2.5.1 DEFAULT template for all examples.

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Oh goody, yet another undocumented snafu. “-)

If you took advantage, albeit unknowingly, of any of the autop functions in old posts… guess what? Once you install the Disable-WPAutoP plugin, ALL your older posts will need to be reformatted with XHTML tags!

Nice. Figured you’d want to know.

I still love this plugin, however!

Shut the damn thing off using this plug-in:

Disable-WPAutoP

I’d really like to rant some more about the type of development teams that get too big for their britches [cough mozilla cough] like the WP team has done and refuse to admit something that JUST DOESN’T WORK IS A BUG… or at least a bad choice… but, my blood pressure is already too high from wasting yet another afternoon on what should have been a 15 minute posting process.

Have I mentioned lately that I hate the Mozilla Dev Team?

I fully support the Open Source Initiative, both in word and deed (financially). AND, I’m an all purpose hater of sell-outs. “-)

‘Nuff said.

The long awaited version of WordPress with an Admin Dashboard is here! And it’s so much more… wow. Just a quick overview of the enhancements I know I’ll make use of:      Whitelisting Approved Commentors (it’s automatic!)      Blacklisting Spammers (goodbye Poker posters)      Ability to add a normal web page to WP      Enhanced Templating System And just in time… I have a client for which I was starting to mull over what CMS might work, just need a simple system for her, nothing fancy. YES. WordPress will do very nicely. And I think I might fix my sloppy design and hacked template for this new version, maybe even redesign things. Yeah, I don’t need a whole 6 hours of sleep a day… “-) Get the new WP here:   http://wordpress.org/development/2005/02/strayhorn/