One of aspects of this project I’ve spent the most time on would be customizing my theme. I’ve learned a little about the theme editor in WordPress. Before, I thought the only options I had to change the appearance of my blog would be through the theme options, which is sometimes limited.
When I first applied the Vinica theme, there were many things I wanted to change. First of all, there was too much going on in the sidebar. For instance, it listed thumbnails for about 5 different social networks I really didn’t need. There was also a searchbar and an about me I didn’t want. All of this stuff was distracting, so I researched how to pinpoint them in the code and remove them (safely, without breaking my blog). Browsing WP help forums helped me to understand how this works.
Before:
After:
In the end, the only things I kept on the sidebar were the “Popular Posts,” a link to the Twitter and Facebook pages, and an archive. I think it’s more streamlined.
I also used the theme editor to add a little blurb in the footer.
As my professor suggested, I kept a backup of my code by copying and pasting it into a word document. This was useful, because at one point I made a mistake, and was too confused on how to fix it. I had been trying to remove the small “Posted by X, Filed under X, etc” text that accompanies a post, when I realized I would need to keep the “Posted by X” so photographer names can be displayed in a submission. When I re-inserted the original, unmodified code, I chose to keep everything in order to not make the same mistake. I actually experimented with adding/subtracting small details throughout my blog that I decided not to keep in the end.
The most important tweak I made with the editor was an essential change to the way the Vinica theme displays content on the frontpage. By default, Vinica only displays a tiny thumbnail of an image until you click on that post. There is no way to change this using the Vinica theme options, so I had to find a way to do it inside the editor. Luckily I found some good resources online, and learned that I needed to pinpoint a certain tag and replace it with something else.
“<?php the_excerpt();?>” needed to be replaced with “<?php the_content();?>” in the template files. After that, it worked the way I wanted it to, and I was happy.