And now for something completely different…
Since Babeled’s inception we have built our content, brick by brick, upon the mighty WordPress platform. Up until this point the visual aspect of our site has been handled by the Connections Reloaded theme.
In our formative phase, the selection of this theme was a unanimous decision amongst the Babelers as an initial starting point of design. During the year plus that we have been running this theme, I have made several modifications to the theme to better suit our needs. Gravatars, about the author sections, and the new homepage excerpts represent a few of the theme changes I have made. This of course in addition to adding a custom header and widgetized footers.
This theme has served as a great sandbox for my cohorts and I to learn and experiment. We have had great fun and success on our journey but now is time for more. I am currently working on a custom child theme that hopefully will bring our site to the next level. Without going into much detail now, this theme is powered by an extensible theme framework that will help to fulfill our vision of Babeled and take us to the next level.
The initial plan is to roll this theme out in phases; starting with a minimalist design that will be far less busy than what you have grown accustomed to on our site. Its evolution from there will become an organic process driven by inspiration and usability.
I am not going to commit to any exact dates, but I can say that the redesign is coming soon. So please keep an eye out and I would appreciate any and all feedback, ideas, suggestions, likes and dislikes. After all, our community is a big part of our inspiration.
Please stay tuned for updates!
3 Comments
That’s pretty sweet. It will be 100% organically made by you? I take it you have learned PHP and MySQL.
Why even use WordPress if you have built it from the ground up? Or did you just build a WordPress theme?
This theme will be built for the WordPress platform. Recreating the wheel completely would be a great learning experience but very time consuming. Not to mention there is no way I could possibly build a content management system that would come close to the functionality and stability of WordPress.
As more work gets completed, I will be writing some more about the whole process.