Make your WordPress theme look just the way  you want it

If you are already familiar with WordPress and know some HTML, consider taking the upcoming CSS for WordPress course offered at Tech Liminal. Web developer Karla Leibowitz will be sharing her expertise customizing WordPress websites; she  will help guide students through the features of CSS in two themes: Weaver and 2010. Some of the topics covered: CSS effects, CSS fundamentals like divs, spans, ids and classes, advanced layout and adding graphics.

Four sessions Wednesdays in May (May 9 – May 30).

Register now

What is CSS?

Ever wonder how web pages get their design, color and format? Files called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) control the presentation of the content on a web page, creating the look and feel for the site. These style rules work with the HTML that defines each webpage.  Using CSS allows for multiple pages with similar markup to share the same design elements. The “cascading” aspect of the stylesheets refers to the fact that the order of style rules specifies the priority of one rule over another.  This allows the designer to have one look for the site overall, and smaller adjustments on individual pages or in specific fields.  While it may sound dry, it’s really the stuff that dresses up the site with the color, the fancy fonts, and the splashy backgrounds.  And who doesn’t want to play with that?

Ann met Anca Mosoiu in the spring of 2008, before Anca founded Tech Liminal. “She was helping out at a neighborhood center just when I was starting the book project with a couple of other teachers. No one knew about us then. Anca said, ‘Why not build a web site?’ ‘Oh, that’s too hard,’ I said, but she set us up on WordPress and coached me on how to do it myself until I could.”

At Tech Liminal, Ann first learned how to build out her own web site in WordPress in only a month of weekly meetings. “It’s an amazing model. I update my site all the time now, including the blog. There are a few sections that only the Tech Liminal team can touch, but the rest I can do on my own. The best thing about what Anca did was – she made me do it myself. She’s a natural-born teacher: patient and willing to help you figure it out.”

Ann applied for various grants, and got on Facebook. Then Ann took a second class at Tech Liminal on Social Media for Social Activism, and now uses both the web site and Facebook to reach an audience many times the size of what it was formerly. She found out that Google offered free accounts to non-profits, and went through their rigorous qualification process.

East Bay Children's Book Project Volunteers learn about Social Media at Tech Liminal from Kwan Booth of OaklandLocal

The EBCBP grew fast, as measured by number of books collected and given away. Ann doesn’t even remember how many books they collected prior to getting online -  “Maybe a few hundred.” The first year after getting the web site up, they gave away over 12,000 books. By last year, they were giving away over 135,000 books, and Ann estimates that this past year they will have given away 200,000 books in over 100 cities and even in foreign countries. Ann tracks every single book that goes through her organization, using a system created by Ann’s grown children, who are both accomplished IT developers themselves.

How do people find her? “Every week I get cold calls from new groups who found me online,” says Ann. You can search for “free books” or “children’s books” and find me.” The organization runs on staff of 20 volunteers. Some of them meet biweekly to sort through donations, others do pickups, or provide graphic design services and other support. The organization runs on a shoestring, with minimal hours.

“I adore Anca,” said Ann. “I couldn’t have done it without her.”

Join us for a 2-session class in which we’ll build a basic website using WordPress, a friendly tool for creating and managing blogs and web sites. We will use WordPress.com, a free hosting provider for the WordPress software, which means no pesky software installation or hosting requirements.

What you will learn:

You’ll learn how to plan your site, choose a design, and create pages with photos, videos, and text.

At the same time, you’ll be learning about WordPress, the leading open source tool for building simple web sites and blogs.

We’ll be using a pattern for a 3-page professional site with a blog, and following step-by-step instructions for creating:

• A Home Page
• About Us, Products or Services Page
• Contact Form
• Blog

Lesson overview

• Session 1: Why Use WordPress? Plan your site, choose a theme and add your content
• Session 2: Add more content – Video, Audio, Images, work with the editor, work with widgets, add contact forms and next steps

Cost:  $10

The public demands it!  We will now be offering a CSS clinic on Fridays, immediately after the WordPress Support Group.  Bring those pesky things that don’t line up, questions about fonts, colors, and more, and get help with your site.

Join us for a 5-week course that will get you started with the WordPress blogging platform.

We will cover the following subjects:

Week 1: November 15 – Why WordPress? WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org, and how to install.  How do decide what you want to build.
Week 2: November 22- The basic components of WordPress content:  Posts, pages, Categories, Links, and Media. How to think of your site to take the most advantage of WordPress.
Week 3: November 29 – Choosing a Theme, and WordPress theming.
Week 4: December 6 – Plugins, Widgets, and other ways to extend your site’s functionality.
Week 5: December 13 – Basic Customization of your site – Graphics, CSS, fonts and more.

Each session is $20, or you can register for all 5 in advance for $90 (a 10% discount).

You can pay in person, or register online using PayPal. Class is limited to up to 10 students per session, so register soon!

Number of classes

All 5 classes $90.00 Individual Class $20.00

Session 1: Why WordPress? And Getting Set Up… (PDF, 1.3 MB)

Session 2: Posts, Pages, Attachments – The WordPress Dashboard (PDF, 2.0MB)

Session 3: Learn 2 WordPress-Session3-Themes (PDF)

Session 4: Plugins.  An extremely useful resource for this is at http://eastbaywp.com: Plugin Picks. This is a constantly updated google spreadsheet.

Session 5: Customize and Maintain your WordPress Site

If you have any questions, please feel free to add them below in a comment.

The project is not yet complete, but here is the presentation for your perusal.

I’ve done nothing on my WordPress site in ages but am about to put up a story. I see (and had heard) 3.0 was available to download.

Do you think I dare do it, here with nobody to help me if it all screws up? My feeling is that it should be OK as there must be millions in the same boat, but don’t want to if I am wrong!

I think you can do it!  The longer you wait, the more people will have found bugs and fixed them, but if you have time to focus on it it’s very doable.  Before you upgrade, you should make a backup of your site – either the content (through Tools -> Export) or the database (through the WP-DB-Backup Plugin).

Here are detailed instructions:  http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

Just follow the instructions carefully, and don’t panic.

You may have issues w/ your theme, or some plugins that will also need to be upgraded. If so, your backup will help you get fixed up. If you are worried about a particular theme or plugin, simply do a Google search for your theme name and “WordPress 3.0 upgrade” to see if anyone has posted words of caution to the internet.

The main topic of the day is custom theming, but we also spent some time discussing backup and security issues, especially in light of the recent “pharma hack” (read more about this at Chris Pearson’s site). This is a hack that corrupts your database, ruins your search results, and makes Google mad at you.

Lori Berkowitz followed up the security discussion with her presentation on building custom themes, using a child theme of the new 2010 framework released with WordPress 3.0.

You can view the full presentation here.

Some interesting points that came from the discussion:

You don’t need to know a lot of PHP to customize templates: you can start with an existing theme and modify the Template Tags to chug what you show on your pages.

WordPress 3.0 will bring custom post types that allow for even richer custom templates for posts of different categories or types. Custom post types are defined in the functions.php file of your theme – which means content types in WordPress are going to be theme or plugin-specific. For custom post types, you can eliminate certain editor functionality, and define a custom taxonomies for selecting information about a post.

We’ll be working with the new features of WordPress 3.0 at Tech Liminal in the next few weeks – even before the official release in the next month.

If you want more WordPress help or advice, join the East Bay WordPresss Meetup .