Renegade Latino

So I got tired of looking at my old theme and I needed a new one. I never really wrote much, online or otherwise, but I decided that I wanted to start. But as it turns out, I didn’t write much because I didn’t really have much to say. I always liked nice full screen themes with a bunch of little sections with flickr images and del.icio.us links and so on. So I put my web development skills to the test, decided to learn some php and made this theme.

Layout: Single Column

So, since I didn’t really have much to say I decided on a single column. It’s just straight up content without many other fancy things. If I stick with the whole writing thing then I may have to make a theme with more flexibility, but for now a single column is all I need.

Theme: Glass atop Fancy-ness

I really like the glass look so I decided to go with that. I liked the use of patterns I had seen on the interweb so I decided to try it as my background. I decided to use .png files for the whole thing becuase I felt it was necessary to really accomplish the whole glass thing and to have a little drop shadow action on the background. The top navigation uses some script.aculo.us action to help showcase the clearness of the glass by seeing it float over the background. If the .png’s are an issue, maybe you’ll get firefox.

Colors: Dark and Blue-ish

I’m a huge fan of light on dark sites and blue is one of my favorite contrast colors to use. My small business site 3am Productions has a nice soft dark green gradient. I like that whole dark background idea because I feel that background doesnt get as much attentions and the lighter color of the text sticks out more and so one focuses their attention on that. I know there’s a bunch of people that don’t like it, but to each their own.

Plugin: Ultimate Tag Warrior 3

Turns out tags and categories aren’t the same thing. I decided to use tags becuase I felt it was a better, easier and more correct way to organize my data. Also the tag cloud does a good job of showing those topics which I post about the most and giving access to similar posts. Also, the plugin is incredibly well written and easy to implement. It comes highly recommended.

Plugin: Usermeta and Userextra

I used these two plugins to create extra fields in my profile so that on the about me page I could display this extra information and update it within the wordpress admin panel.

Plugin: User Photo

I use this plugin so that I can upload an image for my about page from within the admin panel. I made some changes so that you have to check a box in order for it to run and also I use an image resizer class so that any image I upload gets resized to fit the area I need.

Plugin: Custom Posts Per Page

This site runs at least two queries on every page in displaying the content and then the list of the most recent posts at the bottom. For some pages to work the way I want, I set the admin control to allow an indefinite number of posts and then the home pages gets set to 2 through this plugin.

Plugin: WP Tiger Administration v3.0

While I won’t complain about the default Wordpress backend because it works well and is very functional, this plugin makes the backend look phenomenal. This pretty much has little effect for the readers, but if you use wordpress you really have to take a look at this. It is awesome.

Plugin: Sociable

Sociable adds those little images that take you to all those social bookmarking sites. It’s real easy to setup and you can choose which ones to include or exclude and it automatically adds itself to your site without modifying the theme or anything. I just changed the CSS a little bit and it was ready to go.