building a wordpress theme

[adulion]

how hard is this???

im no css master but buidlin a theme for wordpress is fucking rocket science, im making a new site and using wordpress as the bankend for posting news- im really building a cms out of about 4 or 5 different scripts.

i want a simple three column theme than i can build onto.. anyone know a good tutorial or link?

[Mihx]

I haven't tried building a theme from scratch, but I have been heavily modifying several themes since I started blogging back in March. In fact most of my css knowledge has been picked up from toying with WP themes.

If you plan on building one completely from the ground up rather than just find a clean theme with a suitable basic layout and chop it up, you will have to learn what a large number of all the template tags do and how they work together.
The best way to do this is probably combining the theory from the official manual/reference at codex.wordpress.org with a whole lot of researching and picking apart the code of at least a few finished themes.

That's the basic content layout covered, you still got a whole lot of headaches ahead of you the actual site layout and style, and depending on your css knowledge and ability to learn from studying premade stylesheets included with other themes that can take a short while or a very long one to learn.

Of course if you are a css wiz and also have a fair amount of coding experience you will likely be able to learn and put together all these things a lot faster than the average webmaster who isn't used to anything much more advanced than building galleries using tables and perhaps a bit of css to style links and borders.

Either way, good luck . But unless you have very specific needs I would probably still go the route of trying to find a theme suitable for modification instead.

Edit: Just reread your post and noticed you just want to use WP for news. Have you checked out other simpler options instead? Don't know how advanced you need it to be of course, but personally I think I will be going with CuteNews for the news section of my review site.
I'm expecting to try installing it in a couple of days.

[adulion]

i basically want something that i can use to post news and stuff but also the htaccess and category management, i couldnt be bothered writing it from scratch. i started writing something from scratch but laziness got in the way.

i have a design and tables made out and everything planned out to a T...

fuck it, i'll just start writing this out myself.

[AbsolutePorn]

Basicly, what I do is I find a made theme, then edit it completly, so it looks totaly new...

Never done one from scratch...

[Dane]

For a three column theme you need to use absolute positioning. Your rleft hand column is postitioned something like

[html]
leftcol {
postition: absolute;
top: 180px
left: 0px;
}
[/html]
The right something like
[html]
rightcol {
postition: absolute;
top: 180px
right: 0px;
}
[/html]

Adjust the numbers to fit your layout, and include the template files containing the <div id=leftcol></div> and <div id=rightcol></div> sections from within your footer.

[Dane]

But, I have to ask, why you are making it so hard on yourself? Why do it this way, Have you looked at geeklog.org? Great CMS with built in blog.

[Geeman]

I went through the hassle and made my own custom template from scratch.
at the beginning I played around and tried to modify exisiting templates but with these thousands of css classes a lot of the templates use it needs some efforts to completely understand the coder´s structure.
I wasted a lot of time trying to modify templates but never get it exactly the way I want it to look.

the trick is that you need a blank template.
the basic wordpress loops is so easy I really regret that I haven´t built my own templates earlier!
with the help of the codex.wordpress.org site you can find everything you need + you´ll learn how to add a lot more functions that all the other templates don´t have.
you have all related stuff near the bottom of this page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes

this helped me also:
http://www.urbangiraffe.com/2005/04/12/themeguide1/

+ most important: get a blank theme here:
http://www.miklb.com/blog/2005/my-si...rdpress-theme/



oh and you can use every coding method you prefer.
you can also build the whole blog with tables or your custom css.
you´re totally free!

[llporter]

Great info Geeman!!!

[mm107]

subscribed for later reading, alot of good reading in this thread. I was starting to wonder how to make my OWN template as well.

Also, designing your own adult template, and leaving your link code on the bottom has got to be good for SERP. (if they dont edit it out)