We’d love to know what sort of content you’d like to read on ThemeShaper in 2014. Take our quick poll and let us know!
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Take our poll and let us know what sort of content you’d like to read on ThemeShaper in 2014.
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Reblogged this on kwight.ca and commented:
Let us know what you’d love to see on ThemeShaper!
I am interested in more underscores style tutorials, and more about how to use it. That helped me so much in understanding how themes work. I am pushing myself to step up from simply using twentytwelve child themes and following online tweaking tutorials. I test things and play around with child themes on my localhost, so I have a safe environment. Also learning html, css and php from w3schools, little by little. So, I’m excited about what you are doing with underscores and want to use it, but I still feel intimidated by in-depth code.
I find it challenging to make the step from child-theme-tweaker to beginner-developer. I have no training, so I need to pick things up piecemeal, an experience many have had with WP. I’m not savvy enough to pick out why one approach is preferable to another, what is deprecated, or what is simply poor practice. I know there is a debate about official WP certification. I’m not into that, but do see a role for some kind of core training, or at least a suggested way to do things. It seems to me underscores would be a great tool to teach people how to add functions and template tags, and that sort of thing, especially since it uses HTML5 and CSS3. I know its all in the codex, but I learned more from the underscores tutorial than I have from anything else, hands down. There’s a place for teaching.
My latest solution at learning from a sound starting point is to use Reddle. I discovered Reddle today. It appears to be an underscores derivative, and looks somewhat like my current live site, a twentytwelve child. Hopefully I will be able to do a Reddle child theme and get to know more about underscores, then eventually do my own theme using underscores as my starting point. Is this a good way to go? I am open to suggestion.
Would love to see ThemeShaper implement some kind of long-term training curriculum. I think that could help a lot of people gain the sense they are progressing in a logical manner.
I could have written this myself. Thanks for the great ideas. We’ve shared them with the team here. And good luck on your journey.
I think it’s a good way to go. Looking at the date of release _s is likely based on Reddle, not the other way around. It’s hard to remember. 🙂 One informed the other, that’s for sure. Reddle does a bunch of crazy things with layout based on features so it might not be the best theme to start with. I might suggest maybe Twenty Twelve which is more modern and less opinionated in it’s design. Either way, you’ll learn something!
Thank you for your response, Ian. I love Twenty Twelve. I would love to see the theme team continue to develop themes more in that direction where the theme is more of a blank slate, but has enough there for people to make good child themes from, and build off them. Not exactly a starter theme, but a good beginning point. I’ve also appreciated how many tutorials have been written in support of the Twenty Twelve theme. Perhaps having a more blank-style theme as the annual packaged theme could be a good way to teach the WP way. Lastly, I would like to continue to use Twenty Twelve, but I’m concerned that it will become outdated. Is that a realistic concern? Thanks again for your comments.