NewBCamp09: Turning Your Design Into a WordPress Theme
Earlier today, I gave a presentation at NewBCamp, a second-year unconference at Johnson & Wales University in Providence. Sara Streeter again organized an excellent event.
Last year, I gave a presentation called “Introduction to Web Standards“. This time, I went a bit more hands-on workshoppy. The presentation was called Turning Your Design into a WordPress Theme. I started with a few slides (embedded below) and then spent the rest of the time (which only ended up being about 15 minutes!) live-building a WordPress theme from an XHTML/CSS one-pager and a Save As from my Tabigail theme.
That was kind of fun. Basically, I duplicated the theme, activated it, and started migrating the markup and combining it with the theme code. I explained what I was doing it all along and fielded a variety of questions about WordPress, design, and CMSs in general. Due to time constraints, I was only able to build the main blog page—header, footer, sidebar, and index.php. The single post, page, archives, search results, and 404 will have to wait a little bit, but it was nice to get the front page working in that short amount of time.
I’m looking forward finishing up the theme—because it’s a brand new design for Darowski.com. I’ve been chipping away at it for a little over a month… just little bits here and there. It’s at a good place now and I look forward to pushing it live soon.
But in the meantime, here are the slides from today…