Part 1. Part 2. Moonglove Winnower template is currently live on Roy on Magic.
I made several color and formatting changes since the last update. Relatively easy due to the stylesheet. I also had to scrap the CSS hack for implementing equal height columns, it was causing problems with anchors in the URL. I went with a 1-pixel high background image instead.
Currently most of the PHP logic/heavy lifting is done in sidebar.php while most of the formatting stuff is handled in the stylesheet. Since I’m copying from an existing template and not creating one from scratch, I didn’t actually need to learn much PHP. Most of it was moving code around.
I’m not releasing this source yet because:
- The code is still very messy
- It still doesn’t work properly with WordPress Widgets
- I still have some improvements I want to make. The search box is missing for instance.
- I’d like to release some variations (featuring other Magic card art) at the same time.
- It’s not yet XHTML-valid. The autocard plugin in particular is causing problems.
Still, the current one is functional enough that I don’t mind using it on the site.
Most of the difficulty so far has been the design part: thinking about colors, how things should be arranged, etc. As an engineer, it’s not one of the things I’m used to doing. I can’t imagine I would be able to do some of the fancy, complicated layouts anytime soon, though I might be able to create simpler, minimalistic ones first.
See Also