(Are you tired of hearing about this theme yet?) Well, it’s been released, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens! I ended up changing it to display best on 1024×768 and put instructions in the Stylesheet for an easy switch to 800×600 in case there were those who would need that based on their readership. Thanks to Cory Miller for helping this newbie out with the release.

The only real issue is that the Theme Viewer displays the transparent areas as an icky gray color. It’s really unfortunate, because a lot of people will pass it right by, thinking, “ewww, who would design a theme like that?” But, there’s nothing I can do about it. Thanks again for everyone’s input and help!

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Phil Nash is a genius. His trick for making backgrounds transparent while still allowing the other items stacked on top in the div to keep their opacity put the icing on the cake in my first theme for WordPress. Here’s the code

I originally had it in a class, and that didn’t work in Firefox. Once I moved it to a div, it worked except it needed the conditional statement around the bit for IE for it to work in Firefox. (Phil did some more tweaking for me and the class worked fine. I changed the code above to reflect.) Take a look at the theme now. I think it’s a nice touch that makes the whole thing more interesting.

So… the white space on the right side is bothersome to some, it seems. I’m going to work on a variation of the background to include with the theme. Thanks for all the input, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to leave comments- keep it coming today. I’ll probably release the theme tomorrow.

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I’m almost to the point of releasing my first theme for WordPress called “Round and Round”. My goal for this first one, was just to design a clean, uncluttered theme that has a different look than others I’ve seen out there. I’m more of a design person than a code person, so I didn’t set out to create a theme with lots of fancy options. My original idea for the post area was to use transparency so that you could see the background faintly through the white, and it looked really cool… until I realized what you CSS uber-gurus already know: the transparency will apply to everything in the div, not just the background. So, images in the posts were transparent to the same degree as the background, and that would never work and I had to get rid of the effect unfortunately.

This being my first theme, I thought before I released it, I would ask any who are willing to check it out here, and give me some input. Any constructive input is appreciated! I’m considering offering a couple of different background options here on this site that users could easly switch out if they wanted something different than the swirly dots. Is that something you think people would make use of?

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Since my post recently about my plan to design a WordPress theme, I’ve taken some first steps in the project. I’ve learned some things and I have a question for you. I have been looking around for inspiration, and have spent lots of time on CSSbeauty.com - really nice stuff there. Char recommended I go to this well-written tutorial for direction and I’ve gotten through the first couple of pages. He recommends that you install WordPress on your computer, and I started to download all that is necessary to do that and it seemed like such a hassle when I have still 6 available MySQL databases with my hosting package. So I set up a test database, which has come in handy already as I’ve been working on customizing a theme for a client.

So, here’s my question. I see that lots of themes that are in the WordPress theme database indicate that they are based on another theme. How much do you have to change the theme you’re basing yours on to call it “new” and upload it to the database? For example, I started out on my personal blog with the really wonderful Misty Look theme by Sadish Bala, but if you compare the two, you’d never know the two were related. I’ve obviously created a custom theme there, but where is the line? Seems just slapping a different header on a theme wouldn’t be enough, but with some of them it appears that’s all they’ve done. Also, when have you gone so far in customizing it that you no longer include the “based on…” link in the footer. Help me out here.

Thanks for your comments on previous posts David, Char, Phil, Brian and Steve.

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Char of Essential Keytrokes suggested in the comments of the last post that I create a WordPress theme. I have thought about this a lot actually, and while I’m comfortable with the design portion of the project, I’ve only dipped my little toe into the PHP waters. But, it’s something I want to learn how to do, and I’m confident I’ll be able to figure it out with all the excellent resources out there. I’ve decided to take you along on my little journey, and though any of the “experts” who might deign to visit my corner of the blogosphere may find my little journey amusing, I’m hoping that others of us will learn some things along the way.

Are there resources for PHP, theme creation (beyond the WordPress codex), etc. that you who are more knowledgeable might point me to? What has been most helpful to you? Point me in the right direction!

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