Wordpress Designs

[StubbyD]

Carol's recent thread on Bible a day and her implementation via wordpress reminded me I meant to ask the following.

I've been messing with wordpress for various projects - one is a school reunion thing - but I've decided I'm going to redo the family website using wp and don't really like any of the themes I've seen.

Which leads me to ask - any wp theme developers here want to advise how they got started? Are there any pre-requisites such as knowledge of CSS or ?? before one should leap in to it?

Also - does anyone know if a flash presentation can easily be integrated in to a wp site?

[StubbyD]

Anybody ? ? ?

[ibda12u]

Sorry I seem to remember seeing this post and planning on responding later.

CSS is king with Wordpress!
At least that is my opinion.
Really it's pretty simple to get started by making a copy of the default theme. Renaming it something else, and loading it up. From there you can see the structure of the site. (main page, blog pages, archives, sidebars etc..) And you can experiment changing images, colors etc.. it honestly isn't that difficulty once you see how what object does what in CSS. I would think you could create you own them and have it implemented in a couple hours depending on the level of difficulty with the template you're creating.

[David Gillaspey]

does anyone know if a flash presentation can easily be integrated in to a wp site?Hi Stu,

The answer is yes.

Typically any web content management system such as WordPress can be extended (made more powerful or features added) through plugins, extensions, or mod[ule]s. (Which one of these depends upon the CMS.) Try this one:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flash-video-player/#post-2521

Here is the home page for the WordPress extensions:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

I would encourage you to browse through them. You'll get ideas about increasing WordPress's functionality just by browsing through the plugins.

Similarly, I've browsed the directory of plugins and extensions for vBulletin, which powers this forum, and found many features to install.

[JackWolfgang]

Carol's recent thread on Bible a day and her implementation via wordpress reminded me I meant to ask the following.

I've been messing with wordpress for various projects - one is a school reunion thing - but I've decided I'm going to redo the family website using wp and don't really like any of the themes I've seen.

Which leads me to ask - any wp theme developers here want to advise how they got started? Are there any pre-requisites such as knowledge of CSS or ?? before one should leap in to it?

I know something about this since my church (http://fcctlh.org) is using WP for its Content Management System.

There are very plain WP themes with semantic and structured HTML that can be styled to your liking with CSS, but obviously, the prerequesite is knowledge of CSS. Check out http://plaintxt.org/ for examples of the plain and structured themes (I am sure there are others).

That said, the way I started our theme is with a picture of what I wanted. I wanted the tabbed interface (which I had done before) with the menu marked up as an HTML list (why? Because menus are basically lists of choices, and the semantics of a list make sense.) Valid (X)HTML and CSS were important to me, and I knew I was scrapping the old Front Page site. I wanted the ability to have other content editors, but knew I didn't have time to teach (X)HTML. I had known about WordPress and it's claims that "Code is Poetry" and that standards were important. I liked what I saw.

So I started looking at the Kubrick theme (the default WP theme) and reading about theme construction on WP's site. I have programming experience, and I had some PHP experience, so building the theme wasn't difficult to me (finding time was more so). If you don't have programming experience (HTML doesn't count as it's markup. You'll need logical flow experience for Theme scripting), I'd recommend starting with one of the PlainTXT themes and styling to your tastes.

No, I can't provide the theme my church uses. It's not setup as a standard WordPress theme because I am using some static (outside the WP framework) pages with it. Furthermore, it's not completely done yet.

Some helpful links from WordPress.org for going either way:


Working with Wordpress: Site Development (http://codex.wordpress.org/Working_with_WordPress#Site_Development)
Blog Design and Layout (http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_Design_and_Layout#Themes_and_Templates)


Also - does anyone know if a flash presentation can easily be integrated in to a wp site?

I know very little about Flash other than it seems that most people can't use Flash in an accessible way (not that I can either, because I don't use Flash at all, and my experience with flash is limited to about 20 minutes in a trial version several years ago).

[StubbyD]

OK - thanks for this.

My CSS skills are ok but not that good so time to brush up on them I guess.

[StubbyD]

Thanks David - I have wandered round the plugins but hadn't been able to locate one that would take flash.

Thanks for the link - I shall explore that.

[StubbyD]

Jack - thanks for the comprehensive answer.

It would seem the theme of the replies is to sharpen up my CSS and start with the basic template. This I shall do.

Thanks all.