Want to Modify Your WordPress Theme?
Miss Expatria said she liked Blog from Italy’s new look, so I thought I’d write and tell you about two tools which I use to help me tinker with the ’styling’ of this site.
If all you want to do is change some of the cascading style sheet stuff, in terms of colours and text sizes etc, then you will find having the FireFox browser really useful.
Why? Mainly because you can add these two very useful free plugin or extension programs. (You may need to check that the extensions I am about to mention will work with the brand new FireFox 3.X, before installing the latest version of FireFox.):
- ColorZilla - wonderful! You can select the colour you want using a little crosshair, and this great program will give you the code you need to slot into a css file - something like this: #E5E5E5 or E5E5E5, which is the grey colour from the WordPress admin ’save and publish’ buttons. You need to use the ‘#’ before the ‘hexadecimal’ number in a cascading style sheet file, or you can just write ‘gray’ (note the US spelling). I find ColorZilla’ invaluable.
- Web Developer - is another extremely useful, if somewhat more complex FireFox extension. For this tinkerer, I find the Web Developer > CSS > View Style Information menu item essential. Why? Quite simply because it allows me to find which part of a .css file I need to adjust to suit my own needs. When you select View Style Information from the menu, you end up with a little crosshair, which you can then use to find information about the .css item you need to change. It will tell you, via a red bordered box and info in the browser top bar, the name of the <div> or the item you need to change. This means you can find it within the .css file, and tweak it. Wonderful!
If you don’t know what a <div> is, then do not tinker! Even if you do know what a <div> is, don’t go making changes without having ensured that you have a copy of the original .css file in a safe place.
Once you have these tools, you can change text styles and colours easily, and personalise you blog’s look.
If you want to go deeper, then you need to play with things offline, otherwise, you may KO your site!
Have fun! But take care.
New Section!
First, I apologise if you experience any weirdness with regard to the layout of this bog, and if you do, let me know, and I’ll put things back as they were.
The reason for any oddness, If the thing is working, is that Blog from Italy now boasts a new ‘Popular Categories‘ section. You’ll see said section if you scroll far enough down.
To get this new section to work, I had to hack my Wordpress theme a wee bit, basically by copying and pasting some code from another theme and tinkering, on a trial and error basis, until I got the effect I just about wanted.
This new section will allow me to show extracts of a few posts from selected categories right on the front page. This means that readers won’t need to dig around as much, and that I can highlight some of the posts readers have found interesting.
Actually, if anyone wants to see a particular category in this new section, just let me know, and I’ll set it up.
