Today and tomorrow we'll take a closer look at building some template files for your first WordPress theme. The files we'll be constructing are the bare basics of your theme and can be recycled anytime you want to start something new. With an emphasis on the basics we'll look at the files suggested in our previous post on Getting Started with WordPress Theme Design and by tomorrow night (roughly 4 posts away) we'll have our first test theme ready.

In this post we'll work briefly with the header.php and footer.php files. We'll create some basic structures in the files and get them ready for when we really take on the brunt of actually designing the page.

Let's start with the Header. Read the Rest of this post

The most technical part of this whole endeavor will be setting up a 'sandbox' in which you can test your design. If you haven't already I recommend starting by installing WAMP on your computer and setting up a local WordPress blog that you can edit freely without an internet connection. If you're not familiar with how to do this I recommend checking out the excellent tutorial provided by Urban Girafe. Once this is done you'll have a WordPress blog that you can play around with without fear of destroying your main site.

If you can't get WAMP running on your PC then you've also got the option of creating a sub-directory on the server that hosts your main site. If you've setup WordPress once the method is very similar, just create a sub-directory and install a brand new blog there. After it's setup head to the privacy section of the Options panel and be sure that the blog is marked "Private." This will prevent any traffic hitting your sandbox and make sure your design remains private while it's still being developed.

In preparation for some of our later posts you can also create some blank files for the basic parts of your theme.

Template Files Needed for Starting a Theme

Generally speaking you'll need five files when you start designing a new theme. Eventually you'll customize the category, post and page files but for now just the basics are ideal. Head to the themes directory of your WordPress install and create blank files with the following names:

1. style.css
2. header.php
3. index.php
4. sidebar.php
5. footer.php

Tomorrow we'll discuss what to put into these files to generate your first (extremely minimal) WordPress theme.

This week I'm going to be trying something new.

Along with my regular posting (which should be back in full swing starting tomorrow) I'll be running a series dedicated to building a custom WordPress theme from scratch. Earlier tonight I started diagramming a basic theme and added some details that I can use to get started. While I didn't spend too much time on some of the specifics the basic blocking is in place and the concept for the theme is pretty well cemented. Today I just wanted to go over some of the beginning portion of planning that was involved.

Finding Inspiration

I've been wanting to do a darker theme for awhile now. Black themes with splashes of color can be really appealing and can make certain aspects of a page jump. After playing around in GIMP for about an hour I came up with the rough design you see below. With a little influence from the Democracy player I found a decent balance for breaking up the content.

There's still some tweaking to be done but as I get into the CSS more of the details will come together. In tomorrow's post we'll start setting up the basic files needed to put the theme together.

Surprisingly there was only a small reaction in the blogosphere surrounding DoshDosh's Technoraties Favorite Exchange program. While blogger's including Darren Rowse of Problogger questioned the value of the experiment and the result it had on Technorati's Top 100, many small bloggers latched onto the idea with great excitement.

Early on in the experiment, when I felt it still had value and hadn't started receiving requests from splogs, I jumped from a handful to well over a hundred ticks on my "favorited" count. I also jumped about 70 links coming closer to my "200 blogs link here goal." With so much attention being brought to the favorite system, and many blogs turning the experiment into a gaming mechanic, it was clear something would eventually change.

Enter Technorati's new "Authority" system of ranking. Taking a peak at the image above you can see how the original blog information was displayed. That image, taken roughly a month ago, shows the original setup. Rank included a list of total links as well as a rough count of the number of blogs from which those links originated. The new setup can be seen below.

The change here is quite striking. While your rank remains the link count has disappeared and has been replaced by an "Authority" rank. Right now there hasn't been an official announcement, at least that I can see, concerning the change.

I've browsed around the site and even followed the question mark shown on the readout but have found little. The question mark, seen in both images above, still leads to an article titled "Making Sense of Link Counts" from last October. Whether this is a response to the DoshDosh experiment or simply a natural evolution of the system remains to be seen.

I'm curious to see how it develops and am looking forward to the official announcement from Technorati.

Matthew left me a message earlier today asking me how I worked out the placement of my PayPerPost buttons at the base of each post. After checking out Cleaker 2.1 (Matthew's theme) I noted two places for the code that might work nicely. Using some of the code from my previous post on using CSS to float images I worked out the following possible setups.
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