PLEASE NOTE: see this page for a zipfile containing my modified theme.
I was quite disheartened when I installed the ChaoticSoul Wordpress theme here on The WhimWham only to find out that the publicly available version of the theme was quite a bit more primitive than the version being used on Wordpress.com… so I did what any self-respecting geek does: rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty with some theme customisation!
Here’s what I did:
- modified the main page display so that all posts display fully rather than using excerpts — simply go into index.php and replace the_excerpt() with the_content()
- made the sidebar widget-capable, including a customised search box widget that restores the original theme’s search box appearance — very simple if you read this tutorial and take notice of how ChaoticSoul’s native sidebar is coded
- changed the hardcoded “chaoticsoul” text in the header so that it instead displays the blog’s name as given in the admin options — just change chaotic<span>soul</span> to <?php echo get_option(’blogname’); ?> in header.php. (This one is so obvious that I don’t see why it wasn’t included in the first place.)
- added a byline under posts on their individual pages — go into single.php and add ~ by <?php the_author(); ?> on <?php the_date(); ?>. within a <p> tag with a style that’s appropriate
- modified the header image so that it now uses the “Custom Image Header” feature available in the admin interface — read this tutorial and note that to display the image you can call header_image() in the header.php file
- added my name to the footer text
A lot of this could be achieved by hardcoding various bits and pieces (such as a custom header image), but where’s the fun in that?
(For anyone interested: the custom image header mod is more involved than the others just because of the way the theme was initially written with two images instead of one. The mod basically involves using an overlay image over the header image uploaded through the admin panel, thereby dividing it in two.)
I’ll probably tweak things further as I go, but as it stands I’ve got a pretty decent facsimile of the theme as presented on Wordpress.com.
Addendum: I just had to fix the unordered list style as well for the first post on the main page. They really need to publicly release the Wordpress.com revision of this theme because version 1.0 is far too buggy as is.
