Designing with WordPress, Part 1: Building a framework
The majority of my client work revolves around designing templates that need to be ported to WordPress. Anytime you’re doing a lot of work with one application, one programming language, or, in my case, one blog platform it makes sense to “streamline” your work environment.
So what do I do to increase my productivity? Simple: I don’t reinvent the wheel every time I start a new project. WordPress has a basic framework of template files and template tags that almost every blog needs. Blogs have certain elements that they almost always need styled - blockquotes, unordered lists, comments, and so on. Fortunately, I realized this shortly after my first few projects and since then I’ve always worked with a “framework” of sorts on WordPress-centric projects.
So how do you set up your own framework? Easy.
The first step is downloading a text editor that supports “projects” - I use TextMate and in TextMate a group of files that all belong to the same site are grouped in project files. I have heard that InType is comparable to TextMate and available to Windows users. As a side note: I really can’t explain how important it is to have a text editor that you are comfortable with, it will help increase your productivity significantly. I use TextMate because it gives me tabs at the top of my window for each file and has syntax highlighting for every language I’ve ever heard of.
Now you just need to setup your default theme - add all the “important” files for a WordPress “theme”. If you don’t know what all those files are, check out codex.wordpress.org and look at the list of template files.
Within my files I include basic code that I don’t want to constantly retype. For example, in my index.php file I call the header.php, footer.php, and sidebar.php files. I also have a basic WordPress loop call. Within my CSS files I have a few classes and XHTML tags that I almost always restyle - paragraphs, blockquotes, lists, and a few element classes that seem to repeat themselves over and over.
So now, when I start up a new WordPress project I simply open up my default theme, re-save it as a new project, and get right to work. It saves me less than an hour on any given project, but the amount of time it saves in the long run is priceless. Plus I get to ignore the tedious task of setting up new WordPress projects every week or two.
15 responses so far ↓
11 Feb 2007 at 7:01 pm
Good stuff Ben…..I actually started doing this a month or so ago and can say that I agree all the way. It would be interesting to compare your default to what I have.
14 Feb 2007 at 1:48 am
Dear Ben
Can jou help me for my web page
Thanks
Bujar
24 Feb 2007 at 6:38 am
[…] Bleikamp writes about the importance of building a framework for your blog when using […]
7 Mar 2007 at 1:21 am
[…] Designing with WordPress, Part 1: Building a framework (tags: wordpress wp framework) […]
12 Mar 2007 at 2:43 pm
argh. how come you made your site better than mine=P
15 Aug 2007 at 1:57 am
Nice approach, its the same approach with making a software. Re-Used rather than making everything from scratch
8 Sep 2007 at 1:43 pm
This is my first post
just saying HI
28 Oct 2007 at 7:31 am
Pretty much what I’ve been doing so far. It took me more than a month to pin down the basic Wordpress template framework I needed to work with. Then it took just 1 week to come up with my first design.
Goes to show how important a framework is for subsequent template designs.
14 Nov 2007 at 4:30 am
cool
16 Nov 2007 at 2:09 am
Two new studies show why some people are more attractive for members of the opposite sex than others.
The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.
The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.
The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.
It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.
27 Nov 2007 at 3:06 am
lol
lkdadsd
2 Dec 2007 at 11:39 pm
Thankiossk
Cool!
6 Dec 2007 at 7:13 am
lol
thankiossp!
5 Apr 2008 at 4:03 pm
looooool
6 Aug 2008 at 2:20 pm
any chance of you sharing your “framework” file with a newbie?
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