Today, I worked all day on a redesign. The old one was just killing me, because I was doing a couple things wrong and the entire thing had kind of crystallized.
I started this one off fresh, with a clean copy of the default theme. I decided I was going to change as little as possible: I moved the sidebar to the top of the code, added some meta-data specific to my site, and changed some of the verbose garbage they spew out when you get to the end of a post, but I otherwise kept it as similar as possible. No new tags for styling, and I used the names the default theme uses.
I think I’ll take out a couple dummy elements that I didn’t have a use for, though.
Overall, I hope this design looks a little fresher and less cobbled together. Instead of relying on each paragraph having a container class to give it padding, I’ve built it into the table. I’m not using really weird column floating, and my stretch-to-bottom works without using infinite negative margins (those things are a nightmare in IE7).
I had to think a while on the best way to store the files. I’m using WordPress, so the themes are stored deeply in some sub-sub-sub-directories. I was wondering if I could just point the themes to the main folder, but eventually decided to keep CSS and CSS-based images in the theme folder, with everything else in the root.
WordPress uses the root (or rather, which ever directory you specify as WordPress’es root) as the context, and travels from there to find images. CSS, however, always travels from the CSS document. If you keep images in an ‘images’ folder and CSS in a ‘css’ folder, you’d reference ‘images/image.png’ from your code and ‘../images/image.png’ from your CSS.
Since everything but the CSS was working from the top level, I decided to keep everything but the CSS right there.
So I think I’ve got a less hackety them, now. Maybe it’s time for Cozy Cabbage to get a makeover?
Oh! Adding tags on a new post works again, now. I was having difficulties.