How to create one column theme?

  • swejap

    (@swejap)


    15 years, 8 months ago

    Hi, new here.

    Made a search of a tutorial for creating an one column theme with a top navigation, but I can’t find a good tutorial anywhere for this and don’t want to customize an already made theme. I’ve done a theme in Photoshop and sliced the images. I know a bit of CSS, but just don’t know how to build up one column theme. The tutorials I find are outdated or confusing, so appreciate any help where to start out and how to make work effective when creating the theme. Is it ok to use wordpress theme generators to get the base to work with? Or should all the php and css be done from scratch?

    Here is my idea of the theme and prefer to show like this instead of the one I done in Photoshop. The idea is that the twitter icon shows latest twitter post and rss icon shows how many subscribers.

    http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/9933/wordpressmockup.png

    Thanks for listening

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • miocene22

    (@miocene22)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    Should be pretty easy. Here’s a basic structure:

    [Code moderated as per the Forum Rules. Please use the pastebin]

    Style using css. This should work as an index.php file.

    For better theme dev practise, it is better to split this code into header.php, footer.php and a middle bit (index.php, page.php, single.php etc)

    Thread Starter swejap

    (@swejap)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    Thanks for the help but I am really new with php and wordpress structure. I’ve been working with CSS and XHTML for my studies in basic webdesign and one of my task is to make an private homepage.

    I’ve found good instructions for using css, but trying to get a good start with wordpress3 and theme creation. It’s really difficult to find good guides for it. Guess easiest thing to do is to start with an premade theme as a wireframe and work from there. But if anyone can recommend a book about wordpress theming or give me the basic code for the above structure then I would appreciate it allot.

    Maybe I reached for a to high goal so could always drop the idea of using wordpress and focus on css and xhtml for now. Just like wordpress as a cms. Wish there was an easier way to create themes tho.

    Digital Raindrops

    (@adeptris)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    My advise would be to forget creating your own theme and learn a bit about WordPress theme development first, using available tutorials and tools.

    What often happens is you focus on your design and miss easier ways of doing something, get diss-heartened and never complete.

    As you say a lot of tutorials are out of date, however I have on my website over twenty tutorials, these are in easy steps, each post may take 20-100 minutes, they use the latest ‘WordPress 3’ and a ‘Twenty Ten’ child theme.

    If you do decide to work through these, you will use a local environmnt, child themes, template parts and other built in functions, these will save you plenty of pain.

    The theme files are all downloadable from my website, these are for reference so you can build a code library.

    Swejap, here are the layout options 🙂

    Starting with the default Twenty Ten

    First Set you will have Set One

    Finishing with a Business Theme

    Tutorials in the first set
    ■ Getting Started
    ■ The Second Menu
    ■ Smooth Slider
    ■ Hide Titles
    ■ Post Images
    ■ Layouts
    ■ Widgetized Areas
    ■ Left Sidebars
    ■ Right Sidebars
    ■ Content Page

    Tutorials in the Second Set
    ■ Getting Started 2
    ■ Menu Images
    ■ Graphic Searchbox
    ■ Hide Titles
    ■ Admin Options Page
    ■ Header Logo and Info Panels
    ■ Social Media Bars
    ■ Cimy Header Image Rotator
    ■ Two Post Columns
    ■ Category Page

    If you get stuck I will respond to comments and email about the tutorials.

    HTH

    David

    Thread Starter swejap

    (@swejap)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    Wish I had got these advice from you earlier Adeptris. Really helpful and you are right, I better focus on learning wordpress theme development from scratch and work my way up to gather knowledge. Decided to work with what I have know and stick to basic css and xhtml. After all the course is limited to just a few weeks left and feel stressed to finish before that. Thanks allot for the information and really good tutorials you got there. Got them bookmarked and will get back to it after the course and try learning to build themes and how to use php 🙂

    Guess people need to hear from others what to do sometimes.

    Thanks again!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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