Minimalistic Me returns with a bang and now it’s cleaner, more readable and amazingly prettier. I shall not make you wonder more about the name Minimalistic Me. It’s the name of my old theme.
Origin of Name
I am not one bit aware of the exact definition of minimalist but I guess my previous design incorporated it pretty decently. But the new one does the job better. To me minimalism means a clean background, no funky patterns, readable fonts and a fluidity. I guess the fluid part means the most as it gives it a frameless layout.
Earlier, I planned the theme name to be The Return. Then I tried out some other names too but they just didn’t fit. So, I finally settled with The Return of Minimalistic Me.
The New Theme
All the themes I have made so far were quite rigid. Now, rigid here is a very big term as it has a specific meaning for me. If people say that WordPress does everything for me and I doesn’t take me much effort to keep making changes to my blog. For me, it’s a completely different thing.
In the present situation, WordPress doesn’t do everything for me. I need to make changes to my codes if I want to changes some elements. Now, people would begin to say “what an ass he is”. He wishes to create a set of another CMS based operation in a CMS. My answer to that would be a mighty YES.
I wish to make changes to a lot of my static content which comes from templates from my admin controls only. And I have started making changes to my theme to incorporate them. And for making these changes all you need to know is* how to develop theme options.*
Features
There are many new features in my theme and I will list all of them with a brief on each.
Theme Options
There is a text box that I have in my theme options menu that allows me to edit the about me info which appears on my home page.
Shortcodes
There are two shortcodes that I have created. This a little sidenote created for display purposes only.One allows me to make
sidenotes in my posts. Sidenotes are disjoint text contents that appear onto the left of my posts. The other makes a view demo button. All I need to do is send a link to it.
Functions
There are a number of other functions that I needed for a long time and I have finally understood how to make the best use of functions.php. The about me text and shortcodes are all written in this amazing file.
Twitter Follow
At the end of each post you will find a rectangular block with a message on it. That’s a button that links it to my twitter profile. I had seen this sort of thing being used at a number of website and I found it pretty cool. So I included it in my theme too. Its done via a tiny PHP code that picks up a random line from a defined list and displays it in the block.
Final Say
According to my plan, I was supposed to take a week to finish off this theme. But to my surprise I did it in 3 days. I will keep on building more features to it.
I would greatly appreciate a response to my blog’s redesign.