I tried a new WordPress theme a few months ago and there were aspects of it I really liked, though I needed to dig deep and fix some php code… Well, those who know me well know how wonderful of a programmer I can be (meaning I’m terrible), so I never really got the gumption to do something about it… As a last straw, Aaronius commented on my last post that the comment fields were busted and didn’t give direction on what you were supposed to put in each field.. Welp, that’s all the patience I had for a theme that needed some major rework.
To remedy the situation, I searched far and wide for another theme that I could implement w/o a ton of work. I finally found the current one (goes by the name of Scarlett?) and liked it enough to spend a couple hours tweaking and edited php at a level I feel comfortable with. So, for you RSS folks who aren’t actually at the site, here’s a peak at what we’re looking at off to the left…
One of the major annoyances I’ve come across in the last year w/ a lot of the WordPress themes I find available is that they often include a bunch of junk code in the footer that allows the designer to link to some trashy websites and increase their SEO by hijacking my footer. I’m all for giving credit to the designer or website I’m pulling the theme from, but I’m not about to let some doofus link to porn or some other inappropriate stuff using my outward facing journal of sorts. I did a quick search and found some help here. Essentially, this guy suggests putting some finder comments in your Main Index Template, refreshing your page in another tab/window, and then copying the code between the finder comments to paste into your footer.php file.
The process is fairly simple, but with a more complex theme like mine I couldn’t simply copy/paste the code from the page source like the link suggests.. Since I have a custom footer w/ an about me, Twitter feed, and Flickr feed I had to adjust the code I found in the page source w/ a php injection and then modify the remainder from there. Not really a huge deal, but it took my feeble php skills a little while to remember how exactly to do a php injection properly. Ick!
I’ve also done some simple stuff like getting the logo changed to the name of my blog, updating the top menu bar, getting the sexy flash tag cloud built out and modified, and setting images for the moving carousel of posts at the top. I don’t know how much more tweaking I will do, but I feel fairly comfortable with it now. Hopefully this is a little nicer and everyone approves.. Functionality is more important than appearance, however, so let me know if you see something!
