Just when I thought that I had reached the end of Judie’s never-ending “punch list”, she threw another one my way. This time instead of involving changes to the server, it involved customization to the blog itself! First on the list was finding a new theme, which didn’t take long. Then we had to roll out the theme. This took a bit longer since my previous experiences changing over a site’s look and feel have made me much more cautious about doing such things. Thankfully, the theme change is one of the easiest things to do in WordPress and within minutes I had a new theme up and running. Of course, it’s not a “one size fits all” thing, so we had to customize, which was a bit more involved. In case you couldn’t tell, the theme we chose is Beast Blog and Judie chose it because it’s green. Seriously though, it’s a solid theme and more importantly the creator of it is super-responsive and very skilled–more on that later.

Now the theme was in and the customization was beginning. Our ISP has a great Control Panel on the servers called cPanel. I didn’t know how great it was until I started hacking around with the files. Normally I would FTP everything up and then mess around locally in a development environment, only to FTP the changes back to the site. With cPanel, I was soon FTP’ing up, and then editing in almost real-time with a built-in editor on the server. It totally brought me back to my days of using Vi. At any rate, the theme came with decent enough documentation so within literally seconds, I was hacking it up. First stop was the top image intelligently enough labeled bb_banner.jpg. It had the name of the blog actually in it, so that needed to go. Next up I started hacking the PHP and began removing pieces of code. It wasn’t until about 15 minutes later and much hacking that I read the readme on the page which mentioned ways of just commenting out calls in the aptly named sidebar.php for things that you don’t want displayed.

Long story short, the basic hacking was done and now it was time for the big stuff. Which stuff, you ask? Well, the circles in the original theme needed to change to gears–that’s the job of the logo dude–and the background needed to go white to blend in with the background of the images–we tried other colors but solid white is best. Side note: I played with background colors at about 11pm EST after a very long day. Judie was telling me that there was some shaded rectangle image on the screen. I couldn’t see it on my laptop so she snagged a screen shot and emailed it to me. I still couldn’t see it. I figured after a good night’s sleep I’d be able to see it. I was wrong–still couldn’t see it. It wasn’t until I was at work, on another laptop where Dan (logo dude) actually tilted the screen back so that I could see it. Wouldn’t you know, had I seen it the night before I would have immediately seen that a test to change the background color had actually worked–oh well. That would have only saved me a sleepless night wondering why such a simple change didn’t work. Ahh, the life of echo.

So … new logo, gears, what’s left? How about the ad! Contrary to what you might think, this code is so streamlined (I was cursing it initially!!) that it was next to impossible for me to figure out where to put the code for the ad. Of course, I tried for about an hour and then had logo dude give it a go–did anyone see us hacking up the site on and off all day?

Finally, I emailed the developer of the theme, Mike Cherim, who sent me a couple of solutions in minutes–if only I had thought of that sooner. The other nice part about Mike is that the theme is free, and he was happy to support it for free. I suggested paying him and he pointed out the donation box, so we gave him a little something for his troubles.

Now you see the fruits of my (and logo dude’s) labor. Do you like the theme? Think we should change / add anything? Please comment below.