I’m thinking of getting/making a Twenty Eleven child theme, if I have the time. A combination of Silver’s design and Hum’s layout, plus a bit of colour tweaks here and there, and it would be perfect.

I tried doing a child theme before, but it was just too tedious. I could do a whole new theme from scratch faster than writing a child theme. Not to mention, my CSS skills are despicably mediocre. Still, the idea of making a theme out of an already stable and well-supported theme framework (free at that) is very tempting.

Any WordPress theme developer out there willing to make one out for me for a measly USD100? Serious offer.

Update: Scrap the offer. I found the NomNom Twenty Eleven child theme which is very close to what I was looking for. And Zeaks has a paid WordPress customization service for this theme that I can use, so I’m taking up on his offer once I have a clear wireframe of what I want for this site.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Thumbnails in Archives Page: making it work

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I thought I would make the WordPress theme I originally created for The Blog of Rugrats publicly available for everyone to download. Hopefully this will make a nice addition to the small collection of themes available for family- and children-oriented blogs.

The Rugrats WordPress Theme is a two-column theme created and distributed for free. Even though the theme does not depend on any plugin, it is widget-ready. Its content column is fluid according to your screen size. The current header can also be modified to suit your need in case you want to replace the whole thing with a transparent GIF image as I have done with my Blog of Rugrats site. It’s also tested with WordPress 2.3.2, and on Firefox, IE7 and Safari.

My only request is that the footer hyperlink to my site at WebGrrrl.net remain intact.

Download

To install the Rugrats theme, download the zipped file below, unzip it, and upload the directory named rugrats-pub to your wp-content/themes folder.

Rugrats WordPress Theme v.1.0 (as of 29 January 2008)
Rugrats Theme 1.0 demo

For the moment, any request for support may be done using the comment form in this post to get support. Once WordPress.net’s Theme Viewer is back up, I’d rather support requests be forwarded to that site’s Reply section.

Screenshots

Limitations

This theme can be used in any types of blogs and web sites except those that has anything to do with p0rn0graphic, s3xist and/or r@cist content.

Q&A

1. How do I modify the header from text to using image like in your blog?
   I’ll do a separate post on that and will even include a PSD file for you to use as starter, but until then, I hope you can do a little trial and error yourself first.
2. Do you accept donations?
   Yes, I would very much appreciate it. You may PayPal me in any amount to my e-mail address at info{at}cybernt{dot}net. Remember that this theme is free though, so you are under no obligation to donate.

Enjoy!

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For The Blog of Rugrats.

What do you think? Not too shabby I hope. It took me a day or two to complete the whole thing. My biggest challenge was to finish the theme while my 1-year old son attempts to climb on to the table and the computer trying to get his piece of the action.

I’ll be making the Rugrats theme available for public use, as soon as I get a few kinks out of the theme. The CSS part of it isn’t perfect, as the footer gets cut off by the sidebar when a page has a short post in it. Design-wise, though, I’m pretty happy with my first time effort.

If you aspire to create your own theme, I advise you to not only read the recommended tutorials I mentioned previously, but also to use the Classic theme that comes pre-installed with your WordPress blog. Those are great starts for beginners, even for those without any programming knowledge.

Updated 29/Jan/2008: The Rugrats theme can now be downloaded here.

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