TerriMorton.com

Since Graffiti is so new, there are not a lot of themes out there in the wild, yet.  My graphic design skills are non-existent, so I decided to hunt down a Wordpress theme that I liked, then convert it to Graffiti CMS.  

My friend Google came to the rescue in finding different sites containing Wordpress themes, and I finally settled in on Listio.com to narrow down my search.  What I was looking for was something bold, 2 columns with a right-hand sidebar, non-fussy appearance, and rounded corners.  My preferred color scheme was red and black, but soon decided that was too limiting.  Other things on the nice-to-have list were: day planner "feel" dates on the posts, nice blockquotes, sidebar items that wrapped well, and nice-looking unordered lists.

These 3 themes in particular appealed to me:

• Priamo 1.0
• Finestripes 1.0
• Yellow Hell

Ultimately I decided on Yellow Hell.

Karthik wrote a great blog post explaining how he adapted a Wordpress theme for use in Graffiti: Converting a Wordpress theme to Grafffiti.  While I did look at that, I wound up taking something of a different approach, to keep it simpler for my first attempt at theming.

First I copied down the live data to my local machine so that I'd have real data to work with and could easily compare how my work-in-progress theme was presenting the data vs what the Default theme was doing.  This involved:

• Copying down my Graffiti.mdb file from my live site to my local machine.
• Copying down the /blog folder and all of its subfolders and files to my local machine.

From there, I worked from my local machine.  From within the Graffiti admin screen I chose the Presentation>Themes> Create New Theme option.  I removed the ie6.css and ie7.css files. Using these pages as a reference, I went ahead and updated the layout.view, index.view, and finally post.view files (in that order) to match the theme:

• What can I do with Macros?
• View source on the Test run of Yellow Hell

There was no style for the tag cloud, so I had to make that up myself.  When I had it all more or less working locally, I chose the Share option on the theme, which created an XML file.  Then I went back to my live site and clicked the Presentation>Themes> Upload Theme link.  And voila, there was my YellowHell theme.  I clicked on it to select it as the theme for my site, and it just worked.

There are still a few bumps to work out that I am aware of:

• IE6 is not happy with the post view page when comments are still open.  Looks like something silly I need to hunt down.
• There is no RSS icon, although there is a Link tag for it in the page header, so it's discoverable.
• The posting comments experience needs to be improved, as I've not yet applied the style.
• I'd like my own comments to appear differently than those of the other people who have commented.
• I want the year to appear on the posts in addition to the month and day.

And actually, now that I've gone to the trouble of making this theme, I am deciding I'm not as crazy about it as I was when I started.  It's a bit "much".  I may go ahead and work on Finestripes 1.0 next. :-)