A Path Less Taken

On July 29, 2009 my blog changed from a Permalink format of /archive/%post_id%/ to /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%. This was painful in that it broke all my links on the major search engines. I decided that I had to make the change before my blog took on any more content. The weakness of the original scheme became apparent when I was updating a post and getting a different %post_id% for each time. My internal links to my blog would break every time I did this

It’s been a long ride, but for everyone that stuck with me we have climbed the mountain and built our first WordPress theme. Well done! Give yourself a pat on the back for all your hard work!

Adding Options to Your WordPress Theme

Not everyone is a programmer. Even worse, not everyone wants to edit PHP and CSS files to change the behavior of their WordPress blog. Yes, I had trouble accepting this too, but it’s going to be ok. With WordPress Options we have a great way to give users of our theme the ability to change content and behavior without having to edit any raw theme files.

Adding a Thumbnail to Your Theme

Let’s take a brief detour before we dive into building custom menus for your Welcome theme. We have spent a good bit of effort in building our theme. We want to make sure that it has a polished look when it shows up in the administration console. If you go to the WordPress Administration >> Appearance >> Themes you will see a thumbnail image of each theme you have installed in your copy of WordPress. If you are not skipping ahead then you will see no image above your Welcome theme. Since this is easy to fix let’s grab a thumbnail image of your awesome Welcome theme and display it.

I’m a programmer. I say this so you can appreciate when I proclaim that I am not a designer. I think designers are great, but I don’t happen to have one sitting around and waiting to design my cool new blog. The challenge is trying to do the best I can with what limited talent I have. To that end I’m going to share my hopefully helpful advice for doing your own design. It’s that whole teaching a man to fish thing. I’m not suggesting that you have to do anything that I’ve done here. It’s always up to you to decide what works best for your Welcome theme. It is your theme after all.