Assignment
In class today we will be creating a Wordpress Theme.
To complete this lab, you will likely find it necessary to refer to the following resources:
The following instructions should help you get started:
- When creating a new Wordpress Theme, it is usually best to copy a theme you already have some familiarity with. For this exercise, you may pick any theme you like. I recommend picking a theme that you either find interesting, or that you plan on using for your final project, but would like to make some modification to it. It is good to copy already existing themes because you can see how they interact with the Wordpress code and they can give you ideas for what you might do with your theme.
Once you have picked a theme, it is important to make a copy of the theme that you will now edit and make your own. There are two places where this copy should live. One is on a personal hard drive that you use (typically your laptop's hard drive if you have one). The other is on the server. I recommend editing the version saved on your hard drive and then uploading it to the server as you make changes. If you copy the files from the command line, this should save you some time and effort.
If you have trouble picking a theme, I suggest checking out theme ranking websites like this one (no promises any of these are what you're looking for).
I have arbitrarily picked Clean Black for the theme I'll use in this example.
To make a copy, I suggest downloading the zip file to your personal machine, unzipping it (into a new directory), and then renaming the directory--give it the name you want your theme to be called. In more detail, the steps are:
- Go the theme website. If you found it outside of the wordpress website, search for it on the Wordpress Themes page. Right click on the download button and select "save link as" or whatever text your browser provides in this menu. Save it somewhere you can find it in your file system.
Unzip the file. In most operating systems, this should be as simple as double clicking the file. Make sure it unzips either into its own folder, or you put it into a folder where all of its files are self-contained, and there are no other stray files in it. From the command line, the command is probably something like:
% unzip clean-black.1.3.2.zip
Now, rename the directory it is located in to the name you want your theme to have. From the command line, the command is probably something like:
% mv clean-black ugly-rainbow
Now edit the files from this directory.
- Familiarize yourself with what the different files do. This is best done by reading the Wordpress Theme Development page and checking out this infographic.
One of the most important steps for creating your own theme is to edit the metadata of your theme in the "style.css" file. If this information is duplicated on another theme, serious conflicts can occur when themes are listed in the WP admin interface. So fix it now by editing this file.
Most of the changes should be relatively obvious. Change the title. You are now the author. Change the description to reflect what you are going to try to do with the theme, etc.
You MUST keep the same license (if it is a GNU license, or some CC licenses)! You will be in violation of copyright law if you do not.
- Now it's time to edit the files themselves. Read through the files, use Wordpress Theme Development as a reference, and see if you can start making the page do what you want it to do.
Please note that URIs are different from URLs in that URIs must be unique, but need not exist, but also should never change, whereas URLs are website locations that must exist or else are broken. For now, make up a URI. If you don't have your own web space, give it a URI based on the URL it would have if you were to upload it to the Wordpress website, but make sure nothing else has that path yet. URIs can be URLs of course.
For now, keep the same tags, unless you change the theme sufficiently where they no-longer apply.
You might need to edit (or delete) a readme.txt file too.
Submission
To turn in your assignment, please email me a link to your Wordpress installation, and in the email tell me the directory name/path of your created wordpress theme.
Grading Criteria
Out of 25 points total.
- Does it work? 25 points