If you’ve visited round these quiet parts in the past couple of days you may have noticed a change in the winds. Actually not in the winds at all… just a change of this site. It’s now sporting a new look, but I’m sure it looks familiar.
You see WordPress 3 came out and I wasn’t that fussed but obviously upgraded. You may or may not know that the default WordPress theme has now changed with this new release and I thought ‘what the heck, might as well use it and have a site that looks identical to a million others.’
OK, that’s not what I thought at all but I wouldn’t blame you for making that assumption! No, I thought that if I used the new Twenty Ten theme (as it’s so-called) I would be using a theme that was the most up to date and most reliable to work with the new version of WordPress. I hate it when themes break from upgrades. It’s frustrating to no end.
The theme I used before, Bold, worked fine with WP 3, but, there’s always a chance it won’t with future upgrades and I’m going on blind faith that this won’t happen with Twenty Ten because… well, the WordPress peeps themselves coded it.
So I very randomly, a week ago today actually, sat down in front of a local WordPress installation on my laptop and started tweaking Twenty Ten to my liking. Now I haven’t done any sort of web designing/coding/fondling for… probably the best part of two years at least. Where the idea came from to just start doing it again still remains a mystery to me.
Any who, I did said tweaking with some very important ‘rules’ so to speak, in my head. These were:
- Any customizations that could be done through the WP admin panel should only be done through this route, and not through editing the core CSS etc. (E.g. the header image and the main background colour in this theme’s case).
- All editing to be done through my own child theme, so that when things go ‘SGRISHGIRUOS – T’EME NOW DED. KTHXBYE’ I could start all over again. Thankfully this didn’t happen and I named this theme Twenty TEmz. A lot of thought went into that. Clearly.
- Keep editing only to the CSS as much as possible. I didn’t want to mess with the code much. I’ve taken bits out (none that will cause damage by being gone) and slightly changed some (nothing that can affect any upgrades) but most importantly I didn’t add any code. OK, OK, I added one tiny little snippet. From previous experiences it’s the addition of random coding tidbits that causes issues with updates.
And there you have it. This theme ain’t much, I’ll admit, and there are some parts I haven’t even looked at yet that need a lil’ bit of work but on the whole it works and it ain’t too shabby. The CSS file could do with a little tidying up, and I’ll get round to that eventually. Maybe.
I’ve been using other people’s themes for over two years now, and it feels a little nicer now using something I put a little bit of time into making my own. 
Posted from Norwich, England, United Kingdom.
