New Theme: A Novus Vita
I have nearly finished my first WordPress theme, A Novus Vita, and have decided to go ahead an apply it to this site while the finishing touches are being made. I should be completely done tweaking it (yeah right) within the next week or so. I am trying not to use any plugins, or at least as few as possible, so that might slow things down a bit. I would still like to add some JavaScript fanciness here and there and the CSS isn’t completely done yet.
Technically, this is my second theme, but the first one heavily borrowed from the default WordPress theme. Really it was more of a hack job on the original theme. This time, however, I started completely from scratch with nothing but an empty directory and the loop to guide me.
Here is a screen capture for future reference.
It is really a pretty basic theme and very clean I think, with not a lot of overwhelming color, or annoying borders to get in the way of reading. I tried to use blank space as the separator between text. Overall, the process has been a pretty enjoyable experience and I have learned some valuable lessons too.
Structure First, Style Second
The best thing was that for the first time I completely built the XHTML template before adding any CSS. Without question, it was worth it. I will never look back and do it the other way again, intermingling the structure and style stages, flipping back and forth, back and forth.
Coding to standards is easy, catering to browsers is not
I completely ignored that fact that all browsers are not created equal with this theme. I use Firefox most of the time, and since I am my number one user, that is what I built for. Actually, it is more accurate to say that I designed the theme for compatibility with web standards, and Firefox just happens to agree with that approach. The theme is slightly crippled in Internet Explorer 7 and is severely mangled in anything before that. Actually, in Internet Explorer 6, this text is flat out unreadable. The point is that this is a conscious decision on my part to not fix it.