December 8, 2007

I worked a lot on this theme, but honestly I don’t know how to describe it.

WordPress is an amazing publishing platform, and the more I use it the more I know it.
Customization is the key of the modern business, expecially if we talk about the web.

A WordPress theme should provide some features that the other themes don’t provide, but cause the customization of a WordPress website is strictly connected to the plugins you use, I’m a bit stuck on what to do to make this theme downloadable by other people.

The best theme I saw until now, browsing the deep web of WordPress, is SandBox.
SandBox embraces completely my filosofy of web… to change behaviour of a website just changing it’s stylesheet.

I think that I will publish my theme when it will be completely SandBox-compatible, cause it is a (small) standard and I like standards.

However, this theme haves also it’s features, so I will need to extend SandBox someway.

Features of this theme actually are:

The possibility to create a multi-menu with categories and pages in the same branch.
For example, my album galleries 2007 is a page, and it’s in the same branch (photography) of camera reviews that is a category.
The trick is done with the plugin “top-level-categories” plugin and with a xml reading-parsing of the menu, that is doable by the user in the administrative panel.
So, the user can create it’s own menu that is called with a WordPress-like function inside the theme itself.
My structure for example is “post-category-page” so I have the posts links, the category links, and at the end all the pages of the same branch.

This feature comes also with a widget (menu) that displays “on request” in the sidebar the same menu I’m using on the top.
The widgets contains more than one widget each, that is more a customization than a feature, my problem was that the single widgets (searchform, category listing, display recent images, ecc.) wasn’t enough for me cause they would have produced a lot of html code and I liked the actual “navigation-look-menu-links” structure of my sidebar.
In the future, I want to provide a “widget-group” plugin for everyone that accomplishes this task.

At least it’s in the wish-list.
Also a stilesheet switcher (that you can try in the “look” menu) allows the final-user to change and select the style he prefers.
That was always been a mine fad, and now I fell comfortable with that solution.
The secondary style that I actually provide sucks, but it’s here just to show-off it can be done.