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Eight Days and Thirty-Seven Commits Later

And I have myself a custom WordPress theme, created almost from scratch. Well, almost a complete custom WP theme. I’m still working on it. Yeah, yeah, WordPress, blah, blah, it’s everywhere, it’s stupid simple, it’s not what the cool kids do… or so they say! I’d spent the closing months of 2016 learning how to customize Drupal, which by consensus is the more sophisticated sibling of WordPress in the CMS family, yet I kept thinking to myself, “I gotta spend time with WordPress!”

Flip the calendar, and for the last four weeks, I’d been getting elbows-deep with WordPress, and I’m quite appreciative of how quickly I can put together a clean-looking, easy-to-manage website. In one recent “just for giggles” experiment, I tried recreating an existing website with WordPress – a fairly straightforward company website originally built with Drupal – and managed to have something that could serve as its doppelganger in very short time. Spin up a site, pick a theme, customize said theme a bit, populate it with content, and spend way more time dinking with a carousel that looks cheesy and contrived.

Some food for thought about and served on the Lazy-Susan-with-ADD web gadget better known as a carousel (http://shouldiuseacarousel.com).

I guess this rapid spin up and site building underscore just how much more styling and whiz-bang glitzery one can pile on should one have the (client’s) budget to do so!

The Custom Theme Called Bosch!

So, I’d started that over a week ago, seeking to mimic a handful of mockups for a website design. The design was centered around these “panels” that would contain text or images, and those panels would be arranged three-across on a page, kinda like those triptychs that Hieronymus Bosch was famous for (minus the pre-bad-acid-trip depictions of hell). I’d wanted this theme to be responsive, and thanks to a friend who pointed me towards a boilerplate starter theme, powered by SASS.

Fast forward a fistful of days, and I think I’ve learned quite a bit getting not only the “triptych” layout but also a complementary “diptych” template up and running for this theme. All the content is managed as WordPress pages, with the Advanced Custom Fields providing placeholders for the bits of text and images. As noted in an earlier post, the navbar and grid stylings had to be constructed for use in this theme, but I really like the ability to control media query breakpoints for the latter via SASS. The content rendering on the WP template side was a great learning experience working with the WP loops, bits of branching logic in those loops, and a thin shaving of jQuery to give the “panels” some clicky bits. Such technical jargon, truly!

At Least It’s Not As Reviled As Carousels…

I’d like to incorporate modals next – allowing site managers to specify whether a panel can link to additional content, and have that content (currently envisioned as the main body of a WP post or a page) displayed in a modal. Let’s see how many more commits that’ll involve!

The repo: https://github.com/eeronomicon/wp-theme-bosch