I have to admit that I have a really bad habit of jumping head first into projects without doing a lot of research into the ramifications. This has a tendency to bite me – particularly in the area of tech. And so it has done with the “make a WordPress theme from scratch” project.
It started out rather well, and I can’t fault the tutorial I picked. It was a really neat intro to WordPress theming, “the loop,” and basic theme file types. It did what it did and at the end of it I had a skeletal theme… for the front end. The backend was a complete mess, with… well, let’s not violate the DRY principle The DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle is a best practice in software development that recommends software engineers to do something once, and only once. here… If you want the full rundown on all the things that were not working at the completion of the tutorial check it out here.
So my from scratch theme was broken and I had no guidance to get it fixed. After checking out several resources online with my “create WordPress theme from scratch” Google-fu I was made very aware that the one and only reason to make a theme ENTIRELY from scratch was to learn the basics of theming. As I mentioned above… mission accomplished there.
So NOW the new project is to grab myself a “blank” theme that has all of the basic backend functions working and go to town customizing it, adding features as I go. I’m still going to get that awesome brutalist experience, but without having to ram my head into the wall feature-by-feature until I get a basic functional backend.
If it sounds like a cop-out, it’s NOT and here’s why… it’s actually the recommended way to go by the good folks at WordPress. If it’s good enough for the creators, it’s good enough for me!
It’s been a crazy few days so I haven’t been able to make those changes yet, but rest assured – it’s coming. Hopefully today.
ONWARD!