On a recent visit with my mum and her husband I was discussing a website that they are involved with for the Southern Highlands University of the Third Age (U3A) http://sohiu3a.org.au. He mentioned that the site is managed using wordpress which I had only ever heard of in respect to the WordPress.com site. A quick bit of research led me to WordPress.Org and suggested that I’d be very interested.
All I can say since then is that I’ve been very impressed. The download and install via my hosting company was incredibly painless using Softaculous, and getting some basic content up, customising a child template based on the default “twentytwelve” that it ships with was rather simple. Even getting some of my existing PHP code to work as a custom page and connect to a pre-existing database was relatively simple.
For further information on how to setup a child them and customise it within WordPress use the more link below.
Setting up a Child Theme
A child theme is the simplest way to make some customisations to the behaviour of a WordPress site without having to worry about losing your changes in a future upgrade of your theme. The basics are very simple:
- Create a directory for your new Child Theme in the “themes” directory of your wordpress installation. This is likely
www/wp_content/themes. - Create or copy a properly formatted “styles.css” in this directory. The simplest way to do this is to copy and paste the following code into this file:
/*
Theme Name: Nublue
Theme URI: http://harnv.nublue.com/
Description: Child theme based on Twenty Twelve for nublue.com customisations
Author: James McMahon
Author URI: http://harnv.nublue.com/about/
Template: twentytwelve
Version: 0.1.0
*/ - Update the comments in the lines above to reflect your details.
- Note that the @import statement is important so that you inherit all the styles that are part of your parent theme.
- Start customising your theme by adding custom CSS elements, or creating new page templates for use with existing or new scripts, forms etc.