Introducing Wheaton Scores, my shiny new personal Wordpress theme

Well, that at least explains the name – though I admit it has nothing to do with such relevant things such as “wordpress” “themes” or even “blogging”. But I do love watching that video, so any excuse to show it again is worthwhile!

In any case, after many hours (two nights) of hacking about with Wordpress yet again, a new theme emerges for my personal blog.

Some thoughts:

Picking a base theme as a template
I was a loyal K2 fan, but ran into the problems created by the sheer complexity of the code that underlies that mod of Wordpress. K2 is loaded with very cool and useful features, and well-considered design decisions. However if you’re like me and enjoy picking apart existing themes in order to learn a bit about CSS and Wordpress as you go, you’ll quickly realize that K2 has so many “wow, neat!” features collected in one spot that editing it is intimidating. So I went shopping for a new base theme to use as a template to then do what I really wanted.

At the other extreme from K2 is Sandbox, by Scott Wallick over at Plaintxt.org. If you’re in to minimalism when it comes to blog design, Scott it your man. Sandbox is fascinating in that it is designed as an incredibly simple, stripped down base of a WP theme template – a solid starting point for designers. My next attempt at theming will be based off Sandbox, I believe, however for this effort I needed something with a bit more predefined and ready to roll.

So back to that old friend of all Wordpress bloggers, Kubrick (aka “The Blue Blob”).

Kubrick is a wonderful base – it has all you need to do most fairly typical blog designs and it’s so prevalent that editing it is very nicely documented.

Got the base, now what?
Answer: find inspiration! (and code snippets to borrow!)
I decided to do a redesign after looking extensively – and longingly – at the very crisp and clean design Kyle Neath put together at his blog, Warpspire. Beautiful use of fonts, lots of whitespace, and a sweet header concept and menu.

So I borrowed the gist of the top nav menu design from Kyle, though nothing at all of the CSS he uses to do it as he uses a lot of it and in ways I’m not sure I grasp. So I hacked my own, top right of this page.

I also grabbed his idea of publishing his “lifestream” using escaloop (a free service). It’s akin to a much cleaner, “all you” (no comments), display of Friendfeed. Unlike Friendfeed’s horrifically ugly and inflexible blog badge, this one is actually pleasing to look at. So there you go.

I also grabbed the basic footer code from Derek Powazek’s DePo Skinny Theme, which I’m using as the base for a dark one-column theme on a new fun project blog, DrawingAggro.com.

So…what’s really new then?

• Rotating header image, but instead of being in the header it actually leads off my index.php page so only appears when you’re looking at the “home” tab and not individual posts. Uses Matt Mullenweg’s very old but still great Random Image Script.
• FAlbum, a now older and seemingly abandoned hyper-complex way to embed your Flickr albums into a Wordpress blog theme. See an example album here. This was on my old theme, but I cleaned the formatting up somewhat.
• Projects page, which I hope to grow as more fun stuff happens.
• Using Mint now for statistics.
• Making extensive use of Coda from Panic to manage it all. In love…
• Aforementioned lifestream page.
• Friendfeed integration in the comments, via the Friendfeed Comments Plugin.
• Lots of whitespace goodness! Yay!
• Better font management – easier to read all around.
• Mobile support for both admin and reading (mostly…still playing with this).

See all the plugins in use here.

Remaining on the to do list – fix support for IE. God knows why, but at least in IE7 the menu overlaps the header photo on the main page, and the sidebar is on the bottom. I suspect it’s a matter of playing with the main section widths…but whatever. I only look at it in Firefox or Safari, and it looks great there, so my personal pain is limited. If you use IE and are reading this, sorry in advance.

I’ll be writing up some things I learned in new installments of the “Wordpress Amateur Hour” – my not all that serious attempt to jot down some cool things I learned along the way.

All in all, I hope you like the design. I feel like I’ve received a crash course in CSS over the past 48 hours, so it’s helped me immensely already.