I’m finding that my inspiration comes in waves, and that there isn’t much time in between the waves. My skills are growing at the same time, which intensifies the inspiration. This is good, I suppose, but I’m kind of exhausted.
I’ve been working on a theme for days and this theme is more complete and more intricately designed than any before it. A bunch of little odds and ends I chose not to theme much before are getting the full treatment in this theme.
When you start getting to know WordPress intimately you realize there are a lot of things to theme. There are a lot of ways to customize things and make things special. Posts, comments, previous, next, search, archives, pages, date, time, author, and on and on. Each of these things needs to be thought about to create a theme. And even if you’re working fast, when you need to spend time on all these things, it takes a while.
On top of that, you have to develop ways to think of things. For instance, do you see a post as a header, content, and footer? Or do you see it as just content with metadata? Or do you see it as first header, second header, content, footer, and end? As you get into it, you start to form a belief system.
This belief system makes its way into my template php files and they get copied down into my “root” theme to be the reference for the current “state of the art”. As soon as I’m done with one theme, it’s on to the next to give it the updates learned on the last theme and learn some more.
A client said to me the other day about having a blog or website, “It never ends, does it?” I replied, “Nope it doesn’t. You’re always changing, and always improving. Ever time you do something, you realize how you’d like to do it better.”
Submit a Comment