On Blogging Australia

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on WordPress theme editing. Please feel free to read parts 1 and 2 if you want

“The making of On Blogging Australia” is probably a bit melodramatic - all I really did when I moved to the new theme recently was:

• download the Mimbo theme,
• unzipped/uploaded it,
• ran it under the Theme Test Drive plugin (as discussed in part 1 of this series),
• sorted out the categories, and
• played with the PHP and CSS theme files until I was more or less happy with it.

Some notes on specifics follow.

Hacking Mimbo Categories
Mimbo is a magazine-style theme - one of the defining characteristics of such beasts is the lead story concept. That is, there is a story that stays front-of-attention until you (as the editor of your ‘blogzine’) decide to change it.

Mimbo also has a feature column when you first use it out-of-the-box. These are the recent lead stories or the current second-string ones, depending on how you want to present them. I decided that I wanted a current feature instead of a lead story (because this is not really a magazine blog, it just uses a magazine theme - I think that presenting it as a magazine would look silly).

Rather than the Feature category I went with a Recently Popular one. These are the posts that have 10 or more comments. There are five of them listed (adjusted from Mimbo’s default three).

Here’s what I did:

• added “Current Feature” and”Recently Popular” categories,
• went to Dashboard > Manage > Categories and wrote down the numbers of all current categories, and
• went to Mimbo’s Main Index Template file (also known as index.php) in Dashboard > Presentation > Theme Editor and changed the category numbers to the ones I wanted (and if you want more detail here, please let me know and I’ll write a whole post on it - I also added my default categories so that they appeared in the right hand column).

This means that when I post a new story I need to remember to add it to the Current Feature category, and remove this category from old posts (adding the Recently Popular category to new ones). Whatever category I do use from this layout set, I also have to remember to add one of my default categories (About, Aussie Blogger, Australian Odd etc.).
Changing the Mimbo Stylesheet
The Mimbo stylesheet is fairly easy to follow as such things go - Darren Hoyt (the guy who created Mimbo) did a lot of work to ensure that it was readily changeable.

To get the look I was after, I went to Mimbo’s Stylesheet file (also known as style.css) in Dashboard > Presentation > Theme Editor and changed the following elements:

• body (background colour),
• page (font size),
• sidebar (added a border and changed the background colour of the sidebar, then changed it back again), and
• content.feature (changed the background colour of the feature block).

Again - if you want more detail, please let me know - I am happy to write more

I also changed the sidebar file a bit so that I could add some more widgets of my own.

I hope that this series encourages you to edit and customise your own templates so that you will have more control over the look and feel of your blog. Let me know how you go, and if you run into difficulties, ask me for help or post a message to the Aussie Bloggers Forum.