While I'm doing it for the technical aspects, I'm not that good at the design though. This is what I have so far:
Haven't really done any styling for the links and headlines, I'm not quite sure what to do with those yet... Anyway, this is my basic idea, slightly inspired by the theme I use on Wordpress.com. My goals are to keep it lightweight both in design and code.
I'm a bit worried about the widths though. The main column is 480px wide (without padding) which I think it a quite fitting width for text (as it keeps the line-length down to an acceptable level). However most websites is made for 1024px wide monitors, so if I had to do the same I have to add about 500px sidebars which I think is way too much.
I only want one sidebar as I otherwise think the page becomes too cluttered and I chose a width of 270px. I think it looks a bit too wide, but if I make it much smaller the site will become rather thin. (Currently at 790px with padding.)
So what do you guys think about it?
Below are some of the technical issues I have had so far:
I will not say I have enjoyed programming the theme so far. I want to be able to create my site in a DOM and then create the site when everything is done. This gives me quite a bit more flexibility in which order I can do everything in, I can create the header and then afterwards fill in page specific details as the page title, RSS feeds and so on instead of having to pass these things as parameters. I can also create multiple syntaxes for example HTML4, HTML5 and XHTML and switch between them without too much work.
However Wordpress certainly isn't designed to be used this way. Way too many functions simply directly echo the contents out. So I had to write wrappers that redirects the output buffer into a variable and return that. Secondly I had to unescape escaped characters, because I of course make sure to escape everything...
It is starting to work out how I want it now, but it does make the code a bit more ugly...
I still have one major problem with images, they don't resize properly after I import them on another side. So every image is in their full resolution no matter which size have been used. With plugins it is possible to resize them and I finally got it working for the featured images, however it doesn't work for the images in the posts. It seems like the links are still pointing to a specific resolution, so it is trying to access the old images, even though I have resized versions now...
I guess I can simply go through every post and readd the images (without reuploading them), but I think I will do this properly instead. I'm pretty sure I could create my own BBcode in PHP when I messed around with Wordpress a year ago, so I will try make a IMG tag where I can add the ID and size and my theme will create the HTML code. This way I should easily be able to change the size once I have resized the images, but I will also have much more control in what it actually writes. Currently the IMG sizes are hardcoded in the HTML which makes it hard for me to resize them in CSS. (I will of course select some sizes which matches my theme, but I want the site to be able to scale the site down to mobile sizes.)
I will still need to go through every post I made so far.
So I'm moving the blog to http://spillerrec.dk and I have it up and running right now with a random theme. But as I'm having those issues with the images the front page currently contains 10MB worth of images... So I'm not doing anything there until I have a somewhat working version of my theme ready.
EDIT: I made a BBcode (shortcode in Wordpress terminology apparently), added that to the existing theme and fixed the most problematic images. I have confirmed that the shortcode conversion is done every time it displays the post, so resizing the images now automatically updates the post. So I will probably start using that site soon anyway.
