I have redesigned my whole site. While a lot changes are visual, there are even more changes in the way the unseen back-end parts have changed.
Previously, I had a modified copy of the default WP 2.x theme (which is based on Kubric theme). It was reasonable markup, but I spent a lot of time modifying the classes and adding containers to hang my CSS off of. In addition, tracking the changes to the default theme was a pain.
As I read through CSS Mastery I realized that there were significantly better ways to do the markup that would allow even more powerul CSS.
About the same time I discovered the Sandbox Theme. This had a lot of the same kind of design ideas as CSS Mastery; the body element was given tags based on what page it is and everything had classes that help the CSS know where it is being applied.
I looked through some of the themes and borrowed ideas liberally. Most of the layout is from Will Wilkens‘s Moo Point style sheets for Sandbox but I also looked through a lot of the Sandbox Content winners.
Even though Sandbox itself has excellent markup, there were still things that I wanted to customize and Sandbox doesn’t have any markup customization available to it. So I wrote a simple tool to do insert and replace and used that to make changes to Sandbox.
Some of the advantages of the back-end build system I put together:
It builds everything into a build directory before installing it live.
The JavaScript is linted and compile checked before going live.
The CSS is linted and checked for some errors.
JavaScript and CSS are concatenated into one file each and compressed with YUI Compressor
The Sandbox files are tweaked to overcome issues that they won’tfix or things that that I just want different, personally. Such as my serving the content-type as XHTML for those browsers that handle it.
Any problems in the patching and changes will cause the build to fail, which prevents a class of brokenness from ever being made live.
When I’m debugging, files are not compressed and local YUI files are used instead of Yahoo Hosted versions.
The other reason I made these changes is I wanted my site to be ready for the changes coming up in Wordpress 2.3 due out tomorrow.
Of course, I like hacking around with my site too; I’m sure that was part of the motivation as well.
Site Redesign
I have redesigned my whole site. While a lot changes are visual, there are even more changes in the way the unseen back-end parts have changed.
Previously, I had a modified copy of the default WP 2.x theme (which is based on Kubric theme). It was reasonable markup, but I spent a lot of time modifying the classes and adding containers to hang my CSS off of. In addition, tracking the changes to the default theme was a pain.
As I read through CSS Mastery I realized that there were significantly better ways to do the markup that would allow even more powerul CSS.
About the same time I discovered the Sandbox Theme. This had a lot of the same kind of design ideas as CSS Mastery; the body element was given tags based on what page it is and everything had classes that help the CSS know where it is being applied.
I looked through some of the themes and borrowed ideas liberally. Most of the layout is from Will Wilkens‘s Moo Point style sheets for Sandbox but I also looked through a lot of the Sandbox Content winners.
Even though Sandbox itself has excellent markup, there were still things that I wanted to customize and Sandbox doesn’t have any markup customization available to it. So I wrote a simple tool to do insert and replace and used that to make changes to Sandbox.
I also wrote a bunch of makefiles, in the style of “Recursive Make Considered Harmful” and its implementation notes. You can view them in my Mercurial Repository.
Some of the advantages of the back-end build system I put together:
The other reason I made these changes is I wanted my site to be ready for the changes coming up in Wordpress 2.3 due out tomorrow.
Of course, I like hacking around with my site too; I’m sure that was part of the motivation as well.
Ciao!