Education

I started teaching myself WordPress about three years ago, knew enough to be fairly dangerous… and then I got a UI Developer gig that taught me lots about dynamic PHP and subtle CSS and let the WP slide.

Getting back into WP has been fun.  Learning to properly set up a daughter theme so that it  seamlessly extends the functionality and look of the parent theme but goes off in its own direction is very pleasing to me.  Rather than invent building a house from scratch, it’s great to be able to modularize a sun-room on the back, add a skylight, and convert the basement into a rumpus room.

Some of the features that make this different from Twenty Eleven, the base of this daughter theme include:

• Header text superimposed over header image using CSS. That means if this daughter theme gets reused,the theme setting forms still work the same way.  In addition, the superimposition scales up/down as the screen size changes.
• Two new post types — Projects and Code.  That might be a little redundant, but one will be heavily picture dependent, and the other will need a much-wider-than-normal width to be truly readable as intended.  Also, it lets me more conveniently categorize them in the navigation
• A new taxonomy – Type — to categorize the new post types, shared by the two of them.  That way, if for some reason you needed to look up all the projects and code marked as ‘SQL’, it will be dynamically brought up as an archive.

It’s been fun putting this together, as I am a pretty tough client, and as a designer/developer I am far more used to having a firm spec worked out with the client before I start.