No sooner had this site been built, but along comes a fancy new theme. This was always my intention, but it takes time to rip all the cardboard and photoshop all the remains.

Its all gone a bit meta

There are obviously a number of things still to do, notably 

• Create something fun for the breadcrumb
• Style the comments and quotes sections
• Include different styles for posts in different categories
• Fix mouseover events
• Put in some silly animations around and about in places you would least expect

The whole process was fairly straightforward. I started with the iNove theme, which is one of the most popular wordpress themes available. I figured, so long as I am starting from a good base, then I can add in everything I need.

I then built all the different bits using my questionable art & craft skills and photographed them. Once all the cardboard was digitalised I was able to piece things together into a design using photoshop. Layering all the different elements was important so that I could see what the final site would look like, but to give me the flexibility to cut out various bits for use as background images and such like.

Photographs were taken using my Pentax K10D SLR…more about that another time….it performed fairly well, although it was tricky to get a consistent tone for each of the bits of cardboard and so some tinkering was needed using Photoshop (CS3).

The theme itself was fairly simple to apply. I used CSSEdit 2.5 to do all the CSS, since it nicely updates the page as you apply things. I also used Smultron for editing the PHP files. Not quite sure why….it was just the first text editor that came to hand.

The trickest bit was styling the widgets, since they work in a slightly more complicated way to the main body of the page. I had to do some extensive debugging to work out quite where all the mark-up was written out to the page. The key tool to my disposal was firePHP, a PHP debugging tool, which allows you to output PHP debug to the console. I do not have much experience with PHP, so it was not immediately obvious what was going on.

I spent about 4 hours just on my link widget. Annoyingly I had already applied a number of plug-ins and suspected that this had complicated the process slightly. This meant searching for things like “wordpress widget styling problems” yielded few tips. It turned out that the link widget refused to apply my additional style markup because it caches the html. Clearing the cache fixed the problem.

I probably need to do something to cache the whole site really, since it is a bit slow. The hefty background images do nothing to help matters, but I am planning on changing the transparent GIFs to JPGs and then hosting them somewhere like Flickr, where things should load faster.

I plan to post some more information about useful plugins I am using and some how-to guides on the slightly more complicated ways I have got things to work.