My first hand-coded WordPress theme

I decided to roll my own WordPress theme since I just couldn’t find any theme simple enough or which satisfied the ideals I had imagined for a simple no-nonsense blog. My friend Kevin would probably say what I was looking for was a Kotan (枯淡コード) theme inspired by the same principles he bases his code upon in his well-named blog. As for the look itself, I was inspired by the style used by Armin Ronacher’s blog, Thoughts and Writings so I more or less stole it. Most of this theft involved re-verse engineering the look and feel and then implementing php and css via WordPress standards. I had always wanted to write my own theme, but the task was always daunting to me. I thought it would all be too complex to get right. In the past few months, my CSS skills have been getting better. My ability to inspect the CSS and debug how it’s working has gotten better. So, suddenly, I just knew what to do.

The theme is far from complete, I am basically leveraging WordPress’s ability to provide default functionality when you don’t do anything. So, I implemented the most  important bits. After a few weeks when I implement links to my archives, stylize comments, etc., I’ll see if I can submit the theme to the WordPress theme gallery (with due credit fo Mr. Ronacher) and see how the whole theme submission process works.

I called  the  theme “Nick Cody” but I may change it. There are a total of 204 lines of php and css, most of the php was simple modifications to the defaults. Some php files I didn’t bother editing at all. I did very little work and the whole effort took about 4 hours from start to finish.