I decided to create a new Wordpress theme in order to remind myself of why I hate web design. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the original intent, but it was the result. I know this is taboo, and I’m well aware of all the arguments against them, but I miss “layout tables.” I’m sorry, but CSS positioning is overly complicated bullshit. And why is there still no simple way to do rounded corners? I can’t believe people are still using the same stupid hacks (e.g. transparent .gifs) I used back in 1997. That’s it, rounded corners are hereby banned from Conigliaro.org until the major browsers start implementing that part of the CSS3 spec. I would ban CSS positioning too, but I already figured out a nice ugly hack to solve the problem I was having. That doesn’t mean its off the hook though. CSS positioning, you are on probation until further notice!
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
In my last post, I mentioned that I was worried about having to dig too deep into the mess of PHP/HTML that is WordPress templates in order to come up with a decent theme for my new resurrected blog. Whenever I look at other people’s code, I tend to find about a million things I hate, and I start ripping things out until I end up rewriting everything from scratch. I guess I’m just a perfectionist, and I very rarely come across developers who strive for the same level of beauty and elegance in their code as I do (which is why I could never be a full-time developer in the corporate world).
Anyway, I came across this Sandbox theme last night, which bills itself as a “theme for themers.” The cool thing about it is that you don’t have to touch the PHP template files at all. After installing it like any other theme, you just create a new blank theme directory and drop your own style.css file in it. Then you tell WordPress that your theme (consisting of a single style.css file) should use the Sandbox theme as a template:
/* THEME NAME: Conigliaro THEME URI: http://conigliaro.org/ DESCRIPTION: A very stupid theme VERSION: 0.1 AUTHOR: Mike AUTHOR URI: http://conigliaro.org/ TEMPLATE: sandbox */
Essentially, you’re overriding the style.css file from Sandbox with your own. Pretty awesome.
Okay, I guess I’ll have a blog again, but first I need to do something about this theme. Too bad I can’t just download a good one, because everything out there sucks. I just have to make everything myself, don’t I? The only problem is that last time I tried this, I looked under the hood of WordPress and ran away screaming when I discovered the ugly mess of PHP and HTML. I swear, nobody has any taste. I’ll try not to look too deep this time…