Word Press Styling from a Beginner

Alright, I’ve been using WordPress since Saturday now, and I have about an hour into learning what it’s all about. That’s not bad. I have no experience with Blogger or and of the other popular platforms, although I hope to get to know them. I also plan on setting up a user on wordpress.com, so that I can see what that’s all about. I’m pretty good with HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL, so that makes this process much less painless. I can see how designing a custom WordPress blog might confound some users, but I think they handled that caveat quite well with the ability to change colors in the headers, etc.

I haven’t had time to really delved into the specifics of the header files or CSS template on the back end of this blog, I’ve managed to pull some things together. I had an image in Photoshop that I threw together a night or two ago, and I wanted to make that the header. I navigated to the back end and went to the theme editor and started modifying my styles. Something confused me a bit at first – and still kind of does (anyone please let me know a more elegant way). You can’t upload images, etc. for your design through the WordPress control panel. You need to upload them via FTP to a directory in the themes directory. I’ll do a tutorial on setting up a custom theme later.

I also noticed that WordPress uses some open source stuff like MCE Editor (TinyMCE). That’s actually what we use in the content management system we’re developing at Acute Technology. It’s quite a nice little WYSWYG editor. Cheers to the folks that made it.

-JKT