Kestrel will be a single-column layout with the data in distinct rows instead. Here’s an outline of the actual CSS classes used.

• header.php
  • #pageContainer: container for the entire page content, centered on the page.
    • #headContainer: container for the header image.
    • #navContainer: navigation menu.
• index.php/page.php
  • #entryContainer: container for the entry section of the page. Individual posts within it will be of the .entryContent class.
  • #metaContainer1: on the front page it will contain a list of older entries; for individual entries the metadata, trackback link, tags and stuff goes here.
  • #metaContainer2: individual entries have comments/trackbacks here. The front page gets the del.icio.us feed and some other junk, possibly in two columns.
• footer.php
  • #footerContainer: the standard copyright boilerplate.

Layoutwise Kestrel won’t be entering uncharted territories. That’s not the goal, I just want to make a nice theme.

Creating the actual design is the quick and easy part — it’s nothing complex, so I did the scaffold in five minutes. All it really needs is the artwork. (And the usual IE5 workarounds, but I’ll save those for later.)

The major part of the work will be tossing the WordPress tags into the mix. I also have a bunch of plugins that I’d like to support, and I’m also planning to borrow parts of the K2 control panel in the WP admin interface. I like being able to release “sub-themes” for Kestrel in the shape of a small CSS file and some images, just like Vader for K2.

I’m as of yet undecided on Widget support. Since Kestrel will be single-column only, there’s not really any place for a traditional sidebar. I have some ideas for shoehorning it into the “other junk” section on the front page, but it’s on the low priority list.

I just installed the Flickr Photo Album plugin for WordPress, and I’m pretty impressed so far.

I used to post Flickr images by cut-n-pasting a text snippet I had stored as a WordPress note and replacing the relevant links with those of the photo I wanted to post. It works, but it’s kinda clunky and slow to do. With Flickr Photo Album you get a bar on the Write Post screen displaying your latest Flickr images, inserting the proper HTML with just two clicks — one to select the photo, another to select the size of the image you want to post. Perfect!

But wait, there’s more! You also get an integrated Flickr photo album (hence the name) — mine is located here. It looks kinda boring, but I’ll fiddle with the design of it later.

Definitely going to support this plugin in Kestrel.

In the other news, allergy season has started. Yay.

I’ve started work on a WordPress theme tentatively called Kestrel. I’m writing the basic layout now with the theme development page readily available in another tab.

I do admit that it feels a bit messy to use pure PHP instead of a template language like Movable Type uses, but I’ll manage.

Since doing live editing gets messy I’ve set up a local web server hosted on my file server. lighttpd as web server, PHP and MySQL.

lighttpd is very nice for local development — it doesn’t include the entire kitchen sink like Apache does. It took a bit of work to get it going the way I wanted, though. For a while it decided to send me the PHP source code instead of passing it on to PHP – but only when I accessed a PHP file from my workstation. When viewed locally it worked properly.