Modifying Wordpress themes
It’s been a long time since I used Wordpress. I’ve been dabbling with different content management systems in my spare time and at work we’ve built our own bespoke Java web application. After spending the last few hours playing with Wordpress I’m impressed at how the project has developed and the plethora of plugins, extensions and themes available. There’s a lot of love out there for Wordpress - the project must be doing something right.
Once I’d whizzed through the installation of Wordpress, guided by the “One-click installs” on Dreamhost I decided that this site needed a little bit of customization. My last Wordpress blog stuck with the default theme, no marks for creativity. With this blog I decided to un-button the hatches and go all-out and choose one of the default themes. After browsing the array of themes which Dreamhost provides by default I settled on Boumatic by Allan Cole.
Boumatic is a child theme based on the Thematic framework. A child theme is a light-weight theme containing little more than 2 files based on a more extensive parent theme. The Thematic framework defines functions which describe the theme layout. These functions can then be over-written by the child theme to allow greater customization. This reduces the complexity of the child theme, allowing the designer to focus on the more important things in life - such as colour.
I decided that my blog needed different colours than the default ones specified by Boumatic. Installing Agave allowed me to pick some complementary colours with minimal effort - 3 clicks if I recall correctly. To modify the Boumatic theme I downloaded the source of the theme and placed it on my local machine.
Making a copy of the Boumatic theme, originally named ogboumatic, It made sense maintain my modifications using a version control system. Cue github. This also allows you to check out my changes yourself - it also makes it GPL-nice, as opposed to GPL-evil.
I then installed Wordpress locally and created a symbolic link to my modified source in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes. This allowed me to check my changes to the theme immediately without having to re-install the theme using the Wordpress Admin interface.
Once happy I uploaded my new theme to my Wordpress installation and you’re using it to view this page right now. Lucky you.