Built a custom WordPress theme

Posted by on June 19th, 2019  •  0 Comments

I teach wordpress at work, and last quarter I had a student who wanted a really fancy wordpress site. She didn’t like any of the free themes. I told her I’d been tinkering with a custom theme for a couple years, but had never tried to use it on real, meaningful content. I simply had too many questions about how a custom theme worked in real life.

She was willing to put in the time, and I was being paid to teach…so we chipped away at it in the afternoons for a few weeks. Her website ended up looking so good I decided to try my hand coded custom theme on my 9 year old wordpress site. You are looking at it now. It’s a reasonably close match to my main www.websterart.com website, which is all handbuilt, not using wordpress. I’ve yet to try getting the PhotoSwipe plugin to work. Well, I did get it to work with my theme, but it caused problems.

WordPress, by default, puts thumbnails in definition lists. But PhotoSwipe requires them to be in figure elements. And I’d like to style the figure elements in variable column-count columns. However, there is simply too much code going on with his switch from dl’s to figures, which happens in JavaScript. More on that later.

There is a lot going on here. As far as explaining it, I don’t even know where to start. I may write a tutorial on it later. If you’d like to get the zip file of the theme, it is here. Be forewarned though, a lot of what goes on is in the form of widgets, menus and plugins that get added after you activate the theme in the wordpress dashboard.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *