Local Server
In order to develop my theme locally, I’ve installed BitNami in my laptop. It’s a local web host coming with database and necessary programming languages. It also links to WordPress by itself so no extra work is required to connect them. Therefore, when I go to http://localhost/wordpress/ in my browser, I can directly go to my local home page and check how my theme looks like.
From Scratch Using Underscores
This series of course is VERY helpful for me. After watching this, I have the brief idea of the hierarchy and I know which file I should modify if I want to change something or add some feature.
Useful Websites
- Font Awesome Icons,
- WordPress Codex, Theme Development,
- Theme Handbook,
- Site Design and Layout
- WordPress Code Reference.
Some Ideas about the Theme
- Develop for Large Screen: There are plenty of FREE websites online that offer functions of testing website with different screen resolutions, such as Screenfly, and it works perfectly with WordPress site. However, they seem to be not working with local-hosted website. I guess the reason is that they are not allowed to get through the firewall outside my laptop. I’ve sent an email to its supporting team to ask for help.
There are actually some PAID tools that can handle “local and firewalled testing”, like Sauce Labs and CrossBrowserTesting. They have some free trials but only for very short period of time. So I am wondering can we claim expenses to school for FYP?
- Should try different browsers during development.
Colors: When thinking about Chinese style, people think about ink paintings and I personally like those paintings as well. But the major colors for ink are white, grey,dark cyan and black, then the whole theme looks very dark and not lively.
So I am thinking about adding some elements of RED color. Red and black seems to be a good pair and redness is also a symbolic color in Chinese culture which means flourishing and prosperous.
The colors on the right are Chinese Traditional Colors including black, grey and red. I want to find a good match among them to be the major colors of my theme.
Fonts: For the font, I would like to use some calligraphy for titles and the picture on the left is some font I found online. However, I haven’t figure out how to enqueue it yet because all websites I found online are talking about enqueuing nothing but Google Fonts.
- Icons: For the icons and some detailed part, the Font Awesome is very neat but they seem to be very modern and I don’t know if they can fit into my theme. I prefer designs with some Chinese elements, like some examples I posted below. I can Photoshop them to design my own set of icons.
