Notes on the website theme

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:18:08 +0000

Mainly for purposes of documentation but also for anyone who is interested here are my technical notes on this website and its theme.

This website runs using WordPress. It has been developed on version 3.0.1.

Theme

Having messed about for a bit trying to build or adapt my own theme and not achieving anything I was happy with, I decided to search within the WordPress theme library for a theme I liked. I wanted something clean, light and with a flexible width.

I ended up choosing Fluid Blue.

However, on its own this theme wasn’t doing all that I needed. So I set about creating a child theme to add some missing functionality.

Changes implemented using the child theme

I added the ability to use a ‘Custom Menu’, which is a new feature of WordPress 3.0, into the header.

Removed the “Comments are closed” message on pages using CSS display:none.

Created a special template for the home page with three separate additional areas for widgets so I can add RSS feeds and other features. Then added some extra CSS to make this look nice.

I removed the page heading from the page content display area on this template and added some extra CSS to improve the layout of the text.

I used a text widget to insert some code in the first widget area on the home page to create the ‘hat’ navigation links and I added some special “hat” CSS to make this code display properly.

Also added some extra CSS to improve the look of RSS feeds.

I made some changes to the footer and added some CSS to make this look right.

Hat icons

The images of hats that I have used on the site are a set of Hat Icons by Rob Sanders.

Plugins

I am using the Contact Form 7 plugin to provide the email contact form.

I am also using Akismet.

My new website is launched

andyms — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:49:32 +0000

Welcome to my new website. Here I am trying to bring all my online activities together in one place.

I have a number of roles and responsibilities in my life and the people I meet will usually know me through one or other of them. If any of them were to Google me and come across this site I wanted them to be quickly able to get a a rounded picture of who I am. I also wanted them to be able to easily access the other online places they might be looking for, whether it is my blog, Twitter, Luton Lib Dems, or my company website.