Looking for Beta testers for WP theme creator

Sounds excellentc, but I don't have CSS knowledge. But good luck to you with teh development.

~jacqui

Thanks Jacqui. You just gave me a good idea.

It does sound interesting - is this a desktop application to design WP themes? And can you display your results without uploading it to a WP site, or without using XAMPP on your local machine?

I may be interested if you could provide more information - and I'm very CSS-savvy!

Bill

Hey Bill,

It's not really a desktop application and you don't need xampp or wamp. It's essentially a series of html files that mimics a WP theme, thematic in this case. So all you do is open the html files in your browser and start styling the included CSS files. Once you're done you just upload the files/folders to your themes folder.

That's it in a nutshell. There's a bit more involved, like the CSS files include all the thematic code but it's commented out, so you can see what thematic is doing and override it. And more frameworks will probably be added in the near future, thematic is my starting point though.

If you wanna try it out PM me your email address and I'll send it to you. All I ask in return is your opinion on how well it works, how easy it was, etc.

Hey shadowdar,

Yeah I checked out Artisteer but it's nothing like what I'm doing. That looks like a program and my system isn't a program. It's just a way of building a theme with thematic (and soon other frameworks) offline, without WP being installed, without wampserver, without anything but the theme framework. Once the them is done you just put it into your themes folder online and activate.

The concept seems so simple that a lot of people get confused by it.

Imagine building a site with a theme framework like thematic. There's really no starting point. A child theme is included but there's barely anything there. An empty style.css file and an empty functions.php file, great for a web developer, not for a newbie.

What I did was create a series of html files that replicates thematic in action. So you open these html files in your browser and start styling the css files. All the css files have the code from thematic, but it's commented out. That helps you figure out what thematic is doing, and override it.

The whole process, files involved, etc. is so simple that like I said, people seem to get confused on what it is. I love using it though because I can just open up the html files and start styling away. When I'm done I just upload the done theme, voila.

There are some obvious limitations, as with anything. And it's not something that everyone will like, I'll be the first to admit that. But if you want to create a nice little theme based on thematic, it's great.

Wow, just reading that makes me want to learn css, just so I could play, too. Sounds like a great idea.

Good luck!