The majority of my client work revolves around designing templates that need to be ported to WordPress. Anytime you’re doing a lot of work with one application, one programming language, or, in my case, one blog platform it makes sense to “streamline” your work environment.
So what do I do to increase my productivity? Simple: I don’t reinvent the wheel every time I start a new project. WordPress has a basic framework of template files and template tags that almost every blog needs. Blogs have certain elements that they almost always need styled - blockquotes, unordered lists, comments, and so on. Fortunately, I realized this shortly after my first few projects and since then I’ve always worked with a “framework” of sorts on WordPress-centric projects.
So how do you set up your own framework? Easy.
The first step is downloading a text editor that supports “projects” - I use TextMate and in TextMate a group of files that all belong to the same site are grouped in project files. I have heard that InType is comparable to TextMate and available to Windows users. As a side note: I really can’t explain how important it is to have a text editor that you are comfortable with, it will help increase your productivity significantly. I use TextMate because it gives me tabs at the top of my window for each file and has syntax highlighting for every language I’ve ever heard of.
Now you just need to setup your default theme - add all the “important” files for a WordPress “theme”. If you don’t know what all those files are, check out codex.wordpress.org and look at the list of template files.
Within my files I include basic code that I don’t want to constantly retype. For example, in my index.php file I call the header.php, footer.php, and sidebar.php files. I also have a basic WordPress loop call. Within my CSS files I have a few classes and XHTML tags that I almost always restyle - paragraphs, blockquotes, lists, and a few element classes that seem to repeat themselves over and over.
So now, when I start up a new WordPress project I simply open up my default theme, re-save it as a new project, and get right to work. It saves me less than an hour on any given project, but the amount of time it saves in the long run is priceless. Plus I get to ignore the tedious task of setting up new WordPress projects every week or two.
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Good stuff Ben…..I actually started doing this a month or so ago and can say that I agree all the way. It would be interesting to compare your default to what I have.
argh. how come you made your site better than mine=P
Nice approach, its the same approach with making a software. Re-Used rather than making everything from scratch
This is my first post
just saying HI
Pretty much what I’ve been doing so far. It took me more than a month to pin down the basic Wordpress template framework I needed to work with. Then it took just 1 week to come up with my first design.
Goes to show how important a framework is for subsequent template designs.
cool
Thankiossk
Cool!
any chance of you sharing your “framework” file with a newbie?
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