Without You
Not too sure how long ago I was talking about being in the midst of creating a new look for Teacup but I’ll admit that I haven’t made any progress since then. It all is kinda nostalgic because I still remember when the thought of creating a theme for WP is like asking me to jump of a cliff. A few years down the track and I’m pretty comfortable. This is how I overcame that “fear”, if you can call it that.
Back then, I just bought my first ever domain and wanted to host everything and anything on it. I loaded WP and was looking for a theme. The closest thing to what I wanted was Vostok. At that time, it was only available in black. So yeah, it was close to what I wanted but it didn’t hit the spot. I tried and settle cause I just did not want to touch the theme and oh god no “break it”. But after a few days, I just couldn’t take it. So I did it.
I opened and took a peek at the code.
I’ll admit it all looked like a bunch of nonsense to me so I decided to rebuilt it. Not even joking. I took apart each page in the theme and slowly rebuilt it. I avoided copy-pasting the WP tags, hooks and whatever because I wanted to understand what things were for. So as I’m rebuilding, I’m learning what the tags were.
As I’m learning, I’m also tweaking the parts that I didn’t like and adding bits here and there. I can’t remember feeling that it was tedious or slow maybe because it was my holidays and I literally sat on my computer and just did it for a few days until it was completed.
The satisfaction and achievement I felt at the end was … you would not believe. I felt like I just finished climbing Mount Everest. After that, I was not afraid of any WP theme. I load one theme and if I didn’t like one thing, I edit it, no worries.
After a while, I got a bit sick and tired of using other people’s theme and I’m pretty sure that was the time I just got accepted to get hosted here by Modi. So I took the final plunge and built my own theme from ground up without borrowing huge chunks of codes. I only peeked when I was confused on how to use a tag if the codex still didn’t do it for me but I never took any codes from other themes. Not to mention, I felt like a cheater if I was still using other people’s themes when I’m hosted. It’s just a personal feeling …
I’ve been playing around with WP now for a few years so looking back now, I definitely came a looooong way. Was it hard? No. The hardest part was literally just opening and looking at the WP theme codes for the first time. Once I set my resolve, it was done.
Suffice to say, the Vostok theme has a special place in my heart since it gave me the kick-start I needed.
EDIT. I just remembered, the only thing that I still don’t feel too good about is coding the comments template. That is just one big headache in a file, that’s what it is. One. Big. Headache.
First posted at Teacup.