New WordPress Theme
I poked around on the WordPress themes site for a while and ended up choosing iNove which was on the first page (due to it’s popularity). I’m continually impressed by WordPress 2.7. The administration pages are dynamic yet simple and the capabilities of installing plugins/widgets remotely is very slick. It’s nice to be able to install a widget, test it with a blog or page post, and then just nix it if you aren’t pleased. It’s so easy and fast that I keep finding widgets I want to install just to mess with them and doing so.
Now if themes were that easy…
To install the theme you simply move the theme zip file into your $WPHOME/themes directory and unzip it (may need to change permissions depending on your setup). All that’s left is to select the theme using the administration pages.
I liked the new theme, as I was getting tired of the orange on black thin column page, so I made a few changes to the widgets that were visible in my sidebar and let it rip.
I don’t know why installing themes via an install button through the administration pages and the themes site is not available. From an OS perspective, if you can do one you should be able to do the other since you’re just writing files to a directory somewhere under the $WPHOME directory (if the web server has write permissions to the $WPHOME directory (which is required for installing plugins/widgets via the administration pages)).
After I let the new theme soak, I made the following customizations the template:
- I had to make one change because I was pretty anal. I had to modify the sidebar.php file. I did that just because like I said, I’m anal. I basically removed the Archive and Category entries as I would rather have the widget style of those items.
- I added a redirect.php page for an automatic redirect from a page (using a page as a link) so I could link to my personal web pages.
- I updated the header image with a picture I took in Alaska around 5am of the eastern ridge of the Alaska Range. We were leaving the back county in Denali National Park when I took the picture.
- I updated the header color scheme in style.css to change the color of the text.
- Lastly, I modified the end.php file to add a timer_stop entry to indicate how long my server (currently an old Dell Laptop I got for $250) took to generate the page. When I added this line, I also had to edit style.css and change the top margin in the footer.
- I updated the 404.css and 404.php files as the default files that came with the template were bunk.
