WordPress: Well That Wasn’t So Hard
Tagged as: WordPress
Ahh, that’s much easier. From the minute I started writing my first post for Space For a Name, I knew I was going to be installing a blogging software at some point. I also knew that the sooner I did so, the better. I didn’t want to develop an entire website and then have to shoehorn some blogging framework into an existing design; better to work from the ground up. However, I knew absolutely nothing about any of the options available to me, so I was a bit wary.
It didn’t take long to settle on WordPress. I’ll admit, however, that not much research went into that decision. At a glance, Wordpress seemed to offer the level of customization and control over markup that I desired, and my web host provided it as a one-step installation. So, ease won out over rigorous investigation.
I could have installed WordPress right out of the gate, but I wanted to start from scratch, and wasn’t immediately sure how I’d be able to do that. I didn’t want to use the default theme, and I definitely didn’t want to use a pre-made theme…that would kind of defeat the purpose of this entire website. I also didn’t want to waste a week studying an existing theme just to deconstruct it so I could start with a blank slate.
That’s where Whiteboard comes in. Whiteboard is a WordPress theme with no CSS and no design. Just data and basic HTML markup. Just what I needed…almost. The markup is simple, but not quite as semantic as I would have liked. The blog tagline was a <p> instead of a heading of some sort. The same holds for post bylines. It is also lacking some blocking markup to allow for effective styling. However, it was quite easy to get it up and running with my existing CSS. I simply moved a copy of the Blueprint directory (see my post on site layouts) into the wp-content/themes/whiteboard/ directory and added the following lines to the top of style.css:
@import url('blueprint/grid.css');
@import url('blueprint/forms.css');
Over the next few days I’ll be working on marking up the various templates as needed (initially simply defining my CSS grid), but I didn’t want to wait that long to replace my single-page website with a fully-fleged (albeit bare) WordPress installation.
BONUS
The other reason I wanted to get WordPress installed early was to give you, the reader, a voice. You’ve been silent this past week (all 3 of you), and this site won’t survive without your input. So please, comment away!
spaceforaname
com
First!
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Arrrgh I can’t allow myself to leave that as the full content of my post! I’m not good at the Internet.
Seriously though…excellent work on the site so far. I’m a web design neophyte but am really enjoying reading the articles, even if they do require a little background research on my part.
nyce site…
I’ll probably be building my own blog site from scratch just for the sake of it