OKCOOL

I would like to proudly present Version 1 of the OKCOOL Blog Wordpress Theme for download - go forth and duplicate!

I’ve been intending to build a theme for quite some time but, having had more experience building my own web applications from scratch, wading into the open-source code of Wordpress seemed daunting enough for me to leave it for a rainy day.

So, when I was asked to help move the OKCOOL blog over to Wordpress, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally get my hands dirty.

During my first hours tinkering with Wordpress and learning from existing themes, I was pleased to find the learning curve to be quite shallow and the basics were easy to pick up. Things did get trickier, though, once I began to realise just how flexible Wordpress is, both in terms of it’s core functionality and it’s extensibility, and that a ‘good’ theme must be ready to deal quite a dizzying amount of content possibilities.

Thankfully documentation for Wordpress is quite strong - the Codex is a really useful, if slightly segmented, resource - and there are plenty of third-party blogs and websites whose varying approaches do a good job of guiding you through the vast flexibility of Wordpress.

One interesting thing to note is that this theme makes use of the reset, font, and grid aspects of the Yahoo UI Library (YUI), which was ported across from the original Ruby-on-rails version of the OKCOOL blog - something that was surprisingly easy to implement. I’m personally not too keen on the grids aspect of YUI as I feel it adds slightly too much additional markup, but I am a fan of their reset and font stylesheets as they  create a great base on which to code your site’s CSS. I’ve had far less inconsistency problems cross-browser since using them.

Anyway, in summary, my first experience of Wordpress theming was a predominantly good one and I will continue to develop this theme (and hopefully others) in future - you can keep an eye on development over at Google Code.