Wordpress is driving me crazy!

You guys got me thru How to Build Your Website the Right Way, and my first web page. I loved the work as well as your assistance - many, many thanks for all of your kindnesses.

For better or worse (and right at this moment it seems for worse) I am involved in an internet marketing entrepeneur group who are all in love with Wordpress. So, after some months of answering questions about how come I was studying HTML and CSS, I took on Wordpress.

I am a perfectionist and an artist of sorts and I want to do my own theme and expand it to a site design - I get crap for that also. But it is really important to me to be able to do this ( Mt. Everest is safe from me tho - no inclination to take that mountain on).

I have downloaded a number of interesting themes, so I could learn how they did this or that. For the past week I have been looking and looking and darned, I cannot figure out how they do what they do.

When I open the php files and look at the code, there is hardly anything there (meaning very few lines of code). For some reason I am not finding the Wordpress Codex helpful. I already know the parts of a blog and how to use them in a theme, but I am not a programmer, alas, and the parts that aren’t written for first time blog user, are over my head. There are hundreds of questions in the forum every day and most of them are over my head as well - it took me 20 minutes of paging thru to find my question just 12 hours later. I know that Wordpress itself is an amazing idea, but I feel like I am falling thru the cracks.

I think I may need to be able to decipher some basic PHP, but I don’t really know where to start. I don’t need to be able to construct a whole site because Wordpress already does that, but I need to be able to go change around what I want.

Do I need some beginners guide to reading PHP, and is there one?

As usual, you have my undying gratitude for reading all of this and giving me your thoughts. Thanks.

Jeannie

I didn’t hand code the template but I created one with Artisteer. How do I upload the template or should I send it to you via email?

You coded your own WP Theme, can I see it ?

I monkeyed around to get a custom Wordpress theme to work with my logo. But, my colors are apple green and purple. Not too easy to find pre-made themes. And, I’m not coding.

It’s such an awesome product because in about 4 hours I created my theme for Wordpress. I know it’s not free but not coding is worth a lot of money and headache saving.

Great quotes of the day.
I am still using and love wordpress for all…
Like build site, build landing page, and also it can be created for online store with paid plugins…

I tried learning how to create a WordPress theme, but I can’t fill my plate up with to much otherwise with experience, it’s really difficult to juggle it all and get it completed. I gave up on it, and had to pursue another way of getting it completed.

Wordpress is the most used blog management system. I think you may need to watch some of the videos to benefit from all the stress applied in Wordpress. You can still rank, market, get traffic and make profits if you follow a system that has worked for years.

[FONT=“Georgia”]I won’t doubt that, but it’s the difference between doing something yourself, versus using what everyone uses.

It’s a personal thing, and maybe a little irrational. Sort of the same inspiration for those who re-invent the wheel.

The annoyance (at least for me) is not about stats.

But I’ve already made up my mind to learn it anyway.

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[FONT=“Georgia”]I’m in the same boat as you are somewhat.

Right now I’m following along this Sitepoint article written by Matthew Higgins to see if it works for me. Maybe it’d help you too; Create Your Own WordPress Theme from an HTML Template

I have a full webpage already made, with stylesheets, javascripts and associated images.

It burns me up a little that after spending years perfecting my HTML, PHP and CSS I’m finding more and more customers these days looking for nothing but a Wordpress theme, but my consolation is that it may turn into a skill that would separate me from what much of my fellow webdesigners here can do.

Keep looking at the future and it might make the frustrations of the present a little easier to deal with. Trust me, I know how you feel about having to firefight through someone else’s code to build what I can already make. But if you can stay open and get through it, maybe it will become worth it.

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It takes basic PHP knowledge if you want to build a simple theme with basic functions (and trust me, you want to learn the basic things first).

What I would suggest you to do is find an empty (yeah, just the skeleton) theme for wordpress, and look how the files are hooked and how they call each other. Skeleton themes usually have the necessary hooks to integrate header/footer/sidebar into each template.

Once done and learned that part, you can move on and search for a specific function, make a research on google (there are loads of resources on wordpress theming hacks and tricks)…as time passes, you will learn more.

But don’t jump in straight into the difficult part, it will get you where you are (stressed, irritated…annoyed), start from the most basic things.

Cheers and good luck :wink:

Thank you for the suggestions - I shall look into them.

What I have been doing is looking at Wordpress themes and seeing effects that I would like to incorporate into a theme of my own. I am trying to identify what code makes them happen.

I did download the free chapters of the MySQL and pHp database drven site book, and found an intro to pHp, which explains some of what I have been struggling with. I expect most of the book will be over my head, but I am understanding now what it means to have a server based language, and how come I see that the pHp is calling something up, but I can’t see what that is - there are parentheses with nothing inside them and it was making me a bit crazy - the computer just refused answer my questions.

Thank you again for the info.

I’m a fan of Digging into Wordpress. I bought the PDF version, and I’d recommend you buy that as well because they also update the book as new versions of Wordpress are released.

I’ve been at the point where I just don’t know what the hell is going on. I’m still at that point lol.

I guess what I would suggest is that instead of attempting to climb the mountain in one day (even if it’s not Everest), take it one step at a time. What specifically are you trying to do? Start with the layout and convert it into HTML first. Then look at how to convert that into WordPress.

Chris Coyer (one of the authors of Digging into WP) also wrote some really helpful video tutorials on PSD to WP conversion. I check his stuff daily to see what else is new. Good stuff for sure :slight_smile: [URL=“http://css-tricks.com”]CSS-Tricks.com