I'm pretty new to wordpress (only a couple of days), but I have it up and running on my website with the default theme. First of all I would like to change this theme. I have found a tutorial directly from wordpress but it is extremely vague: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development. I'd like to have a totally different layout for my website though, with only one page being replaced daily with a different article - a new article everyday basically. But I don't know where to start. I want to first create the theme though, I think that will put things in to perspective. How do I do so? I know the principles of php and enough about html and css to create whole websites. Thank you
That link should tell you everything you need to know. You basically just edit the theme files to get the layout that you want. The best way to learn truly is to experiment. If you have a specific question I could help you with that, but to tell everything involved in creating a custom theme would go way beyond the scope of an answer for this site.
Related
I've been building a site (already hosted at a domain) for someone who wants the capability to edit it themselves but they do not know html and would rather be able to visually edit it. Has anyone moved their site to a CMS (preferably wordpress) while keeping the same look of the site and could give me some pointers?
Thank you
You would need to learn how to create templates for wordpress and then recreate your theme using their way of doing things. Its not very difficult for someone used to css/html/php but there is alot of functionality you need to take in so you wont be doing it overnight.
This is a good place to start: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
If you are simply looking for an easy to use WYSIWYG editor for Html you could try to implement TinyMCE in your current site. I've used this myself and it is rather nice.
Ive been using wordpress for awhile now and wanted to try something different. Enter in my discovery of the world of static website generates. Now I have my eyes on Octopress which I know to be built on jekyll. Before I start getting dirty in ruby I want to know if its relatively possible to translate my current wordpress theme to a static site.
That's exactly what I did recently:
http://eduncan911.com/blog
I copied a friend's Wordpress theme (with permission) of almost the same design:
http://forgetfoo.com
"I want to know if its relatively possible"
To answer your first concern, the answer is a big ol' YES. That's what make Jekyll so good for these kind of things: it's just raw HTML and css and js in a few directories. Place them anywhere you like, and start cutting away at chunks in includes, wrap some plugins, etc and before you know it, you are rake generate and rake deploy.
Octopress makes it even sweeter by having a large number of plugins, a blog-like template system already structured*** (see below), and bunch of defaults all setup for blogging.
The issue with Octopress' theme is as I said above, it is purely setup as a blogging platform. You'd need to highly modify, or in my case just completely ignore, the template they have and just piggy back on the nice Github Pages, SCSS, and plugins it comes with and roll your own html templates. It's really really really easy.
Where do you start?
/source/index.html
You start here with this YAML file. At the top is a definition of layout, which is used to pick what "wrapper" or layout you want to surround this index.html content with. To make a new template, one like yours, I'd call it layout: fuse_homepage. Then go into source/_layouts/ and create a new `fuse_homepage.html'.
Start with your own theme and format as you want
But see, you don't even have to do that. Hell, just paste your entire homepage HTML right
into that source/index.html to start with (make sure to keep the --- YAML markers at the top, but get rid of the layout). Start there and break things out later when you get tired of coping and pasting the header/footers. Heck, just start there - make a fuse_header.html and fuse_footer.html and just share those for now.
Ignore Octopress' theme layout - it's just for hackers that don't do UX and just want to tweak things. Designers or people that like to control their code will want to roll your own.
It really is that flexible. However you want to break it up, you can. Want a new page, just call rake new_page["title"], which all this does is create either an /title.html, or /title/index.html, depending on your settings in the config file. But see, you don't even have to do that. Just create the file yourself - BAM, it is copied on deployment.
Regrets with Octopress
Trying to force the themes to do my bidding, chasing rabbits
I only regret trying to follow the Octopress' author's format - wasted so much time and got so turned off at Octopress. In the end, I just ignored it and did my own. Much easier, and I know where everything is. I also wanted nice and cleanly formatted HTML - a show that I care about my code. The default Octorpess theme and structure invites so many mis-placed tabs and spaces that it's just ugly. Doing your own, you are in full control, space by little space insert.
Importing posts
There's a huge amount of Google links to help you export your WRX from Wordpress, and to generate a the post files automagically. Be prepared to try several different ones as they aren't all perfect.
import comments into Disqus
Unless you are already using Disqus on Wordpress, you are going to have a horrible time with this one.
I can now claim myself to be an WRX/BlogML expert after my nearly 100 tries of importing and exporting and fixing and so on. There is no documentation on either importer (Disqus nor Wordpress) to tell you of the individual required fields. For example, Wordpress requires wp:comment_id to be set, and unique for each and every post you import whereas Disqus requires an wp:comment_email field, even though say it is optional (it's BS, argh).
Be prepared to hack code. It is a hacker's framework after all
Do note though: it is a lot of work to hack around the static site. Doing your own template will save you so much time. You'll also may want to write your own custom plugins, which I did, to get around the bugs in peoples github repos - it's pretty easy, but does require coding.
I spent about a month off and on until I got my new blog/static site to where I liked it for launch. A lot more than I wanted, but it was "fun" learning new languages (Ruby, Python, installed Debian linux in a VM cause Windows just sucks at that stuff).
If you aren't prepared to write that much, there are a couple more static site generators out there as I blogged about (hey, got to show off my Octopress and custom theme!):
http://eduncan911.com/software/the-static-blog-boom.html
Btw, nice site...
I was wondering if I needed to learn javascript and or php to make a site that can move content from page to page as new content is added (like a blog). I was thinking of using wordpress and wipe the design and write my own css, but seems you need to do a $30 update to have access to css.
Is there a free site (like wordpress) that could help me out with the php part or whatever is needed to have this kind of functionality? How many hours would it take to learn php to get the 'blog' running correctly if I only know html/css right now, with a bit of javascript and can manage jquery plugins.
Thanks alot for any answers.
If I recall correctly, WordPress is entirely free and fully customization per your liking - no charge.
PHP would be your answer to do this, and Javascript would only help compliment the transitioning. If you've never tinkered with PHP or any other software programming language, you will spend months perfecting this. It's a whole other ball game.
But like I said, WordPress is entirely free and modifying the CSS is as well. I've never heard of a $30 charge to change WordPress CSS file.
You're talking about upgrading a WordPress.com site where they host it for you and strictly control what you can do.
You want to go to WordPress.org - it's free and you can do whatever you like - but you do need to sort out your own hosting.
I am a beginner with Magento trying to build a simple custom theme and while I have done a fair bit of research I am really in need of some simple clarifications because I think that the learning curve is rather steep but worth it once some basic concepts are understood. My design goals are very basic: All products listed on the homepage with different image sizes, floating left.
What I've done is downloaded the 'Modern' theme as a base to work with and renamed it:
app/design/frontend/default/mytheme
skin/frontend/default/mytheme
I've done some basic tweaking to the phtml files in
app/design/frontend/default/mytheme/template/
However, I have a number of questions:
Where exactly is the template for the homepage? Is it only customizable using the CMS>Pages control in the backend under Design>Page Layout? This confuses me because I am used to developing in wordpress and creating a custom php file for the index/homepage. I really think this separation of html/xml is really the hard thing for me to grasp.
If i can only customize the homepage using the backend, I see the block: <block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_new" template="catalog/product/new.phtml" after="cms_page">. Navigating to mytheme directory, I don't see anything referring to this. Where are these things located? Am I supposed to copy any file missing from mytheme from the base?
Is it only possible to have 1 column, 2 column, 3 column etc. layouts?
An endless thanks to anyone who can steer me in the right direction. I really think it is just a matter of understanding very important fundamentals of how Magento themes are structured. At the moment I am already finding it so frustrating having my finder window open 7 folders deep and having to move around constantly. How I miss the simplicity of Wordpress' single folder themes.
Thank you!!
I suggest you to read all things in http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base before you go further
homepage content can be anything you want and you can reference it to be anything with layout file descriptors
MVC concept tells that it is taken from catalog/product_new block and from whatever is set to it's template. In current case catalog/product/new.phtml is used and you can edit this
you can have a completely custom setup and not restricted to anything that default contains. However it is wise to use defaults as almost all extensions depend on defaults more or less.
A very big part of magento design is layouts.
whether you choose to use a local.xml or change files from layouts folder you must have an ideea on how they work.
Here is a link for start
Intro to Layouts
There are many others resources outhere ofcourse.
I'm new to Drupal, and frankly after reading through the Drupal documentation, their guide to themeing isn't all that helpful. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but it seems like there are certain variables you always have access to and different functions you can define to override or implement behavior.
Long story short, I'd like to be able to trace through the Drual themeing code to understand hwo it works. Doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult, but I'm having a hard time finding a good reference. Anyone know of one?
http://www.nerdliness.com/article/2007/09/10/drupal-theming
There are a few different resources you can use that might help out:
You can use the irc channel on freenode: #drupal-themes
A module that I hear a lot of themers like is the Devel module - http://drupal.org/project/devel. This is what will allow you to trace through the code and see what variables, function calls, etc. are being used.
You might also want to check out the Druapl 6 Themes book
I'd recommend Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting over the Drupal 6 Themes book. I put together a Drupal 6 Theming Cheat Sheet that includes links to the resources I've found most helpful.
Honestly, though there are good links and books to learn from, the way I've learned quickest was to start creating a theme. Create your theme.info file, then begin converting an index.html to page.tpl.php or page-front.tpl.php using the snippets in the cheat sheet or the nerliness.com link mentioned in Robert Harvey's answer. Those two files constitute a bare-bones theme.
From there, you can override additional template files as needed. You can use the Theme developer to find just what templates to override, to customize a particular part of the site. Remember to clear the theme cache, as you add new template files.
Also, make sure your theme has the base template of any file you want to override. See the "Note: There is a bug which prevents derivative template files from being detected..." section of the Core templates and suggestions page, for more details.