Well, look what we have here!
If you would be so kind as to look around you’ll notice that this blog has a new paint of coat. This paint of coat is one that I’m particularly happy with as it’s the first WordPress theme I’ve used for this blog that I created myself.
I shouldn’t take all the credit. This theme is still a child-theme of the already excellent Twenty Eleven theme (which was the theme I was using previously). However this child-theme has enough design of my own making that I feel comfortably calling it my own theme.
But wait! There’s more!
Along with creating this new theme I’ve also begun to develop it openly. You can view the source code for this theme on its GitHub page. Any changes that you see appear on this blog will appear in that repo. Watch it for fun, or ignore it for glee.
There’s still a few things left that I need to do with this redesign. I need to add a few more splotches of color (somewhere, not really sure where) and also fix up any other styling issues that might pop up. But I was so eager to start using this theme that I figured there was nothing to lose by switching over to it today.
Development Notes
In case you’re curious I grabbed the background repeating pattern from Subtle Patterns. It’s a great design resource to add just that right hint of flavor to the background. I might try a few different backgrounds but for now I’m quite pleased with ‘furley_bg’.
Also I’ve started an important practice while developing this theme: using a local dev environment. This is awesome for two very important reasons:
- Any changes I make to my local environment don’t affect my live blog.
- The workflow is much, much faster. Since all files are local the time it takes to refresh the page to see how my changes look is close to nil.
I’ve also kept my ‘wp-content’ folder out of my local WordPress installation. It was getting lost amidst the rest of WordPress files so I moved it into my root directory, which you can see in my GitHub repo.
I followed the information given here on how to move your wp-content and you can see how it looks in my wp-config.php file on my repo. This made the entire dev process much more enjoyable.
And as they say, a happy dev is a productive dev.
