Philocrites asked in a comment “I am trying out Word Press 2.0, and wonder if you have tutorials to recommend — especially about modifying the templates and stylesheet.”
This isn’t unexpected. I’ve been pestering him on his blog about moving from MovableType for a while, and now that he’s been plagued by more comment spam, I can imagine the pressure is heightened.
There may be good style tutorials, but I don’t know where they are or if they exist: that’s not how I work, and I wanted something painless for this blog. So I took a theme that I liked, was open-sourced, and tweeked it to fit. It is a lot easier to change colors than reposition elements. (Colorschemer.com’s online facility is good for getting a set of coordinated colors.) This blog’s style is based on “Steam†by Samir M. Nassar, though he no longer uses it for his SteamedPenguin.com. You may still download it.
Exec-PHP and Akismet are essential for make tags to drop PHP goodies into other pages and to kill spam.
I’d also recommend finding a theme that works with the new sidebar modules functionality. Removes a lot of the hassle of hacking PHP.
I’ve been toying with a plugin called Canvas that turns modules on or off and moves them around in the layout without requiring me to get into the php yet. But its companion stylesheet editor plugin (Ink) is apparently buggy.
Chutney, how do I learn about the sidebar modules?