Phew! I must say… making my own custom template, one that does not depend on a particular WordPress theme, was far from as easy as I imagined it would be. But then again, I’m a rookie when it comes to WP coding, and I learn something new every day.

I must admit, I was oblivious to how much effort something like this requires of a newbie like yours truly. The best part was creating the graphics, then came the coding. I’ve had a few headaches with all the tags I had to look up to see what they did and how to prevent plug-ins from injecting lots of un-necessary code into the template.

The template is roughly 95% done and the code is pretty clean, I dare say. Still polishing the CSS to get a decent look, and I’m aware of some of the most common Internet Explorer bugs. Even though I haven’t tested it with Internet Explorer 6 yet (why oh why are people using IE anyway?), I will make sure it looks OK before releasing it.

What I have learned since I started on this journey to learn the basics of WP coding:

• Templates rule!
• The WordPress community is large and, for the most part, supportive.
• Creating your own custom WP template from scratch requires a good bit of effort.
• I have a lot more respect for WP theme designers doing everything from scratch.

Check back later, as I hopefully will have it ready in the next couple of days. I really should get back to tweaking the Flexibility 2 theme as well. Right now it’s still “out of the box” and looks very feature-less and naked. In due time!

Haavard