Building Elemental 2: Getting Started

Categories

Web Design, WordPress

As I mentioned in February I had a conundrum – I wasn’t sure how to make changes to my theme Elemental without breaking peoples sites. Thankfully the people who read my site are super clever and suggested I create a version 2 and so, over the last month or so, that’s exactly what I have started doing.

I am currently in the process of ripping Elemental apart – and near enough rewriting it from scratch – and I thought I would write a bit about the process and the ideas behind what I am doing and why.

Objectives

Web design and development has come a long way since I started building Elemental – and in a similar vein my own skills and knowledge have improved as well – and as such there are a host of things I want to do with the theme that I couldn’t do before. Since I now have this opportunity to rewrite everything I am going to take the time to do things properly.

The main things I plan to do are:

  • Simplify
  • Make better use of built in WordPress functionality
  • Use modern web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc)
  • Use WordPress programming standards
  • Optimise
  • Build in support for popular WordPress plugins

Over the next couple of months I will be writing about Elemental 2 and the design and development process. This is so that I can get feedback on what I am doing from the wider WordPress community.

How was it for you? Let me know on BlueSky or Mastodon

Link to this page

Thanks for reading. I'd really appreciate it if you'd link to this page if you mention it in your newsletter or on your blog.

<a href="/2012/03/building-elemental-2/">Building Elemental 2: Getting Started</a>

Related Posts

21 Mar 2014

How to Get Started With WordPress Theme Development

I was asked recently how to get into WordPress themeing and so I thought I would answer publicly. Perhaps my thoughts can help others.When I first started using WordPress things were much simpler. The default theme was an index.php and...
27 May 2013

WordPress: 10 Years Young, What Does The Future Hold?

WordPress is now 10 years old. I started using wordpress 9 years ago – which means I joined the WordPress community early on. The reason I chose WordPress is simply because of the fabled 5 minute install process – I...
16 Sep 2009

What’s new with the Elemental WordPress theme?

Elemental is the upcoming theme framework for Pro Theme Design. It’s been in development for absolutely ages, and the code is really showing it’s maturity, and I am really pleased with the possibilities it opens up.The focus when developing Elemental...
05 Jul 2016

Dogfooding a New WordPress Design

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to test and promote the product.Wikipedia – DogfoodingThis is another thing on the long list...