New RAO Blog

Well, after 4.5 days of concerted effort the new look of the RAO blog is finally complete. Check it out. The theme is a child theme of the WordPress 3.0 default theme, Twenty Ten (as in 2010, the year it was released… those cheeky wordpress developers… pfft!). Anyways, it took a bit of researching on theme development before I was able to actually understand what I needed to do. The WordPress Codex is not as intuitive as one might think. I found the most frustrating thing to be the lack of date stamps or version numbers on the articles. I was never quite sure the information I was reading actually applied to WordPress 3.0. I muddled through it and was able to minimally change Twenty Ten to meet my goal of getting the same look and feel as RAO’s main site.

The RAO theme uses a custom header.php and footer.php and functions.php, which overrides the twentyten_setup() function of the parent theme. It also borrows from Themeshaper’s Thematic theme library of style sheets. We decided to go with a two column approach as opposed to the old three column style, but thanks to Thematic’s 2c-r-fixed.css and 3c-fixed.css templates, I can make the switch between the two with the deletion of a few comments in the child theme stylesheet. I also dabbled in widgets and created a custom RSS subscription widget. There are tons of these plugins available for download, but they didn’t have quite the desired formatting (or maybe I just wanted to make life difficult for myself). I learned a lot in the process and plan to make some improvements in the near future.

For now, I’m going to learn as I blog. I figure that will be the best way to become a true WordPress guru and hopefully learn how to make some dough off this whole blogging thing.