Getting started with WordPress

So here I am with a nice new WordPress.com Blog, after browsing the themes available for a good while I settled on Hemingway because of it’s simplicity and clean look, but who knows, by the time you read this I may have altered the theme. That Chaotic theme was looking quite nice… and is looking repeatedly nicer each time I browse the Design section of my Dashboard.

So what’s happening at the moment?

I’ve been doing programming on the web for quite awhile, and although my PHP and CSS knowledge isn’t the best at the moment, I’m hoping to improve both. After browsing many of the cool WordPress themes such as Agregado, by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson which in my oppinion is one of the most beautiful looking WordPress themes around at the moment ( Seriously I can’t convey how nice that theme is), I was left thinking “Hmm, why can’t I do something that cool”, so I decided to learn how to make a WordPress theme myself starting from one of the initial ideas I mocked up.

Initial Idea

I’m not completly satisfied with it the mockup itself, but I think it has a nice feel to it.

Setting up WordPress with my XAMPP server was a piece of cake, but when I enabled name based permalinks I found none of the links on my test blog worked at all. After having a look around I found out XAMPP has Mod_Rewrite disabled by default, so a quick trip to the http.conf file and I had meaningful permanlinks enabled.

The intial forays into the index.php file were filled with the deep confusing that can only come from seeing all of the little pieces of PHP inbetween the html for the first time. Confusing as they were I persevered and after a trip to the friendly google search engine I found the wonderful site WPDesigner. As well being a site containing many nice looking WordPress themes and tutorials, one particular thing stood out to me, the 16 step tutorial entitled “So you want to make WordPress themes huh?”. It’s more than just good it’s great, I’ve already been through it once and it provides a good basis from which to develop your theme. With it’s aid and a few trips to the blog design and layout section of the WordPress codex, I’ve begun to try and take my initial idea above and make it into a theme.

I’ll update this blog with how the theme’s progressing, but for now theres quite a bit of PHP for me todo. If you have any links which you feel might help me in my task feel free to leave them in my comments.