I spent most of last night and this morning rewriting the jimthompson.org theme, which I now call Rhapsody in Blue. The first time I wrote the theme, I did it in an inelegant and crude manner; in particular, I made poor use of the CSS selectors already built into WordPress. In fact, I couldn’t figure out how to select some of the elements, and made hacks to the WordPress source code so I could directly select some elements. Clumsy.

After spending some time getting to know CSS better, and in particular getting to know WordPress’s use of CSS classes and identifiers, I decided I could rewrite my theme without having to touch the WordPress source code. At the same time, I took advantage of the down time to upgrade my installation of WordPress, which had undergone a minor bug-fix release since I first installed it in April.

One of the side effects of rewriting the theme is that I know have more consistent style across the different pages in the site. I also tweaked the style in a few places – minor changes I think look better. The front page is nearly identical to the original version of the theme; the new tweaks are most evident on the archive pages.

Now that I have a theme that’s more “in tune” with generic WordPress, I have released the theme for anyone to use. The download includes the PhotoShop files necessary to generate new header graphics. Download the theme files from my Rhapsody in Blue page.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.