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My Almost Completed Second WordPress Theme

Posted on July 16, 2010 by robbychen

I have been making this second Worldpress theme for the final project in my CMS class. Compare to the first theme I made, it has more customized features such as custom background and custom navigation menu, the design of the theme is more complex, and the theme layout becomes more standard. Here is an overview of its features copied from this page:

  • Custom background
  • Custom menu (only allow one level of drop-down menu)
  • Three widget areas
    • Left widget area – default widget is categories if no widget is set
    • Right widget area – default is the search form
    • Bottom widget area – default is tag cloud
  • Show category and tag list at the end of each post, display a message  if there is no category / tag assigned
  • Custom 404 page
  • Display 10 recent posts under each post

For more information on each of the above features, and to see the code snippets for them, read the original post.

This theme is still incomplete because I need to add the comments area on the post page, as well as some design changes. The deadline for this final project is next Thursday, July 22. I still have some time to finish up.

I will post the final progress of the theme and its source code when it’s completed.

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Big Update

Posted on June 17, 2010 by robbychen

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 3.0 today and tried it. I love some of the new features for this release , especially the new theme customization options. Therefore I updated the structure and layout for the whole blog in order to use the full theme customization features in 3.0. Here are the updates I made:

  • Switched to the new default theme

As I stated above, in order to use the full theme features, the theme needs to be compatible with 3.0. Some options didn’t appear when I was in the last theme after the upgrade. So I switched to the new default theme came with WP 3.0.

  • Logo added (special)

The special means that this logo is only for the blog. The main difference between this one and beta one is that I added Ubuntu and NetBeans to each side of the logo in order to accommodate the header image size for the theme.

  • Blog menu added

Menu creation and editing is a new feature in WP 3.0. I placed a menu below the logo. The items for this menu are relevant to the blog.

  • Updated blog name and description

This domain name is based on my name. So I decided to rename this blog from robbychen.com Blog to Robby Chen Personal Blog, as well as its subtitle (description).

  • Categories restructured

After upgraded to WordPress 3.0, I reordered the categories to include sub-categories once I noticed that the hierarchy feature for the categories was fixed.

I also discovered WordPress.tv when I tried to find the tutorials for WordPress 3.0. It’s the official WordPress video site for providing tips to use WordPress. I’m currently figuring out how to create multi-site setup with 3.0. Maybe I will use WordPress as a CMS for robbychen.com!