I’ve been spending quite a few hours lately trying to refine a pure CSS flyout menu for a clients website recently. I wanted to use CSS because I didn’t want to mess with the html that the dynamic menu I was using (NAVT) output. So I went with a nice one from CSS play. Nice and basic, pure CSS, even for IE6, although, it required a table to be placed around nested un-numbered lists, which meant screwing around with NAVT PHP, which I wasn’t real keen on. Today I stumbled upon the holy grail. It’s a tidy little htc file with some javascript, that, in short, allows any tag have a hover option within IE6, allowing your nice CSS flyout menus to work in IE6, fantastic stuff. It’s called Whatever:hover and I highly recommend this little gem, it takes the stress out of IE6 optimisation in an XHTML world… wow that was lame.

Wordpress is now my CMS of choice for any freelance work I do. Once you get the hang of developing themes for Wordpress, it’s incredibly easy, and you can pretty much lay it out however you want, my first theme was simply the one you’re looking at now, basic, but functional. I finished developing a theme for a school website I’m doing at the moment and I got it together as smooth as if I was building a static page. Usually when I’m designing a layout for a web page, I just mock the thing up in Fireworks first, get it looking how I want, that probably takes the longest, I have trouble getting a layout I feel good about. Once I’m happy I slice up the images I need and then go write the code (don’t worry I don’t export the Fireworks HTML, yuck!). I think the main thing I like about Wordpress is the pure simpleness of the administration section, it’s basic as you like, and should be easy to show not so savvy people how to use it. A lot of people I’ve shown the Joomla admin section to have looked at it a bit wide eyed, but Wordpress is a lot more straight forward. Until recently I thought it was just a blog application, but if you wanted to, you could ignore that altogether and just setup a site with editable static pages. I’m almost done with the current freelance Wordpress site I’m doing at the moment and I’ll plug it when I’m done.

If you want to learn how to develop your own Wordpress theme, I recommend the Cyberhackz tutorial, it’s straight forward and to the point, and honestly, once you’ve done one, you’re ready to go. One suggestion I’d have is to follow the tutorial with an XHTML layout already developed, and cut and past the segments you need from that into the segmented theme files, works quite well. After that, keep yourself a blank basic theme for reference.

SO I guess I’ve pretty much finished the layout. Just need to re-add my static content again. The sidebar widgets are bloody fantastic, you just drag your sidebar items where you want them. I also found a nice little menu plugin which allowed me to make the navigation menu at the top of the sidebar. Pretty happy with how smoothly it all happened, got 98% of the side done within a day… Ok so it’s 1am, but close enought.

So I’ve decided to vamp up my site a bit. I’ve always used wordpress but previously I have been using my own layout and grabbing data my own way without using themes or any plugins. This time I’ve fully integrated Wordpress on my site allowing me to customise my sidebars easier, add plugins and generally make things a bit easier. I’ve spent most of my time trying to work out how to develop a template from scratch. I Followed a tutorial from Cyberhackz I think it’s mildly outdated but it explains very well how wordpress themes are segmented. I’ve pretty much finished it, I just need to mess more with the CSS to get it right. Then I’m going to try and integrate my custom scripts as Wordpress plugins. As you can see I’ve stuck with the same basic layout, but with a slightly cleaner look. Should be a lot less cluttered when I’m finished with it.