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Pixel-in-Gene

Exploring Frontend Development with Design / Graphics / Technology

My first shot at Wordpress themes

I am sure I am not the only one who would say that Wordpress is a great blogging (+ CMS) platform. There is a vibrant community developing all kinds of stuff with Plugins, Themes and what not! As a fun exercise I decided to create a Wordpress theme for learning more about the platform.

The result is a theme called FlipCard, which you can download here.

flipcard-small

Here a few details:

  • 3-column, fixed width (1000px)
  • 2 sidebars on the left (well suited for blogging, especially with code running to the right)
  • Based on the Sandbox theme. The Sandbox theme provides most of files for fetching the data. I only changed the Stylesheet.
  • Works in Firefox, IE 7

My workflow

I started by creating a XAMPP Lite environment by following this article. Then I downloaded a copy of Wordpress 2.5 and linked to a backup of my blog database. This was a simple database restore done via phpMyAdmin. The real work started after that. I used Firebug extensively and read lots of stuff on Wordpress Codex. I also looked at lots of CSS design showcases like CSS Zen Garden, CSS Beauty, Best of CSS Design 2007 and a ton of other stuff. Once I had enough background knowledge I decided to make some mock-ups. I used the uber-design-tool: Photoshop, to try out different ideas. The hover animation for the top menu was the most tricky and required some careful pixel-twiddling. BTW, the name FlipCard comes from this hover effect!

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Other interesting area was the search bar at the top,

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and the admin section at the bottom of the page:

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The icons were from the Silk Icon set by FamFamFam.

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The stripes for the background of the website was created using the AJAX Stripe Generator.

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The end result is of course quite simple-looking but I’ve learnt a lot in the process. And that was the whole idea!

My first shot at Wordpress themes
Pavan Podila
Pavan Podila
March 30th, 2008