I’ve been trying to work through some issues after getting a comment on one of my fonts articles. It seems some people have been experiencing some problems getting Google Fonts to work on their child theme. So I was messing around with mine, and I experienced the same unpredictability. After messing around with things, I got mine straightened out, maybe this will help you!
Alright, this won’t be much of a tutorial per se. I’ve just been messing around a fair bit with a sh’load of code lately. I’m trying to overhaul my blog. Thing is, I’m not good at this stuff. I guess I’m not a designer. I can figure out how to code what I want… I just don’t know what I want. This is gonna take months. I figured I’d share some fun stuff as I make it up! So here is something for the popular wp-pagenavi plugin!
Lately I have been (slowly) working on an overhaul for my personal blog. I haven’t made a custom theme in well over a year. Also, I’m no designer. Making a theme is a long and drawn out process for me. But one thing I did know is that I wanted to really lighten up the site, make it not so dark, but also give it a bit of a fun feel. A great way to accomplish this is with some great CSS3 effects. One thing I had to work out was how to be able to use CSS3 on the featured image. I’m sure this is simple if you are experienced, but I hack my way through things, so this one took me a minute to figure out.
I took a look at VoodooPress today on my phone, and you know what? It looked downright butt nasty! Just a few things were out of place, but it was bad. Twentyeleven has a responsive structure built right in. If you forget to account for it, your site may look bad too! Here’s a few quick fixes.
So over the past couple of days, we got a basic child theme setup. We started with basic width and header images. Then we moved on to margins, and relocating some stuff in the header, and customizing widgets a bit. Let’s just look at our final code.
Let’s finish what we started yesterday. We’ve started up a new child theme, and made a few customizations to twentyeleven through our child theme already. We’ve got a wider theme, a wider header image (but shorter), and we’ve allowed ourselves to use little images for our featured image header if we want. Let’s finish this up by reducing white space, adjusting the header some more, and wrapping the widgets.
I dig twentyeleven. It’s got a lot of fun features and it looks pretty good. There were a couple of things I didn’t like, however. The header is kind of GIANT. So I’m going to need to take care of that. Also, although it is flexible width, the maximum width was a bit too narrow for my taste. Also, I need wider sidebars, I don’t like things looking so cramped over there. While I’m messing with the header, I have my own logo for VoodooPress, no need for the site name to be up top. I’m going to get rid of that, and while I’m at it relocate the search and site description to overlay my header image. Finally, I like my widgets to have their own home, they need a nice box to seperate them from the content a little. It’s pretty easy to get this all done, check it out!
We have spent several tutorials customizing our Voodoo Child Twenty Ten Child Theme. We’ve done some customizing to our functions.php, header.php and style.css. If you’ve followed along you may want to compare notes. Back on this post we reviewed our header.php fully. I’m just making this post so you can take a look at my css so far in case you would like to compare. It’s got all the changes we’ve made in it so far. Header changes, width changes, removing site title, etc. Here it is:
This is pretty much the last step in getting our child theme set up. As in the basic styling. Before I start to dig in and see what I can accomplish, I had to take care of the basic styling. So we have a pretty complete child theme, and we’ve gained some real useful knowledge on how things work. Let’s just take a look at one last thing, let’s get those post formats styled. We recently learned how to add in all of the post formats to our child theme if we wanted to, but now we want to make them really stand out.
I like the way our Twenty Ten child theme looks after making it a bit wider. Everything has opened up, the widgets especially don’t look so cramped. However, I still don’t feel like they stand out enough. I find that things just kind of look like they are floating over there, competing with the content and looking a bit out of place. I think a great way to take care of that would be to just wrap them up in their own nice little box. Let’s take a look at some simple css.
