After playing a little bit with WordPress, I’ve decided to write a simple WordPress theme for getting familiar with the process.

Since I’m running this blog, I’ve decided to use the Jekyll minima as a source of inspiration. This exercise’s result is the minimajekyll WordPress theme.

The first step im developing the theme was to write a static website, so that I will know what CSS and HTML structure the theme will be using.

Then, the actual coding started. I used, as starting theme, the Twenty Twenty WordPress theme. I’ve downloaded the Twenty Twenty theme, extracted it, and renamed the folder to minimajekyll since that’s the name of the new theme I wanted to create.

Next, I’ve moved the minimajekyll folder to the folder /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes on my computer, so that I could test the result of my changes as I made them, on my local WordPress installation.

After creating, on my local WordPress, several posts similar to the posts I regularly publish, I was ready to make the actual code changes.

The first change was to replace all twentytwenty occurrences (with different caps) to minimajekyll. After testing that everything still works ok, I’ve updated the style.css file in order to update the theme’s look and feel. Then, I’ve updated the header.php, footer.php, index.php and several other files, in order to have the desired appearance. This process involved reading the existing code, updating it, testing changes; it was a trial and error process. Last step involved some cleanup: there were several files that I didn’t used, so I deleted them.

In conclusion, writing a new WordPress theme is a fun process. A prerequisite is having a static site, so that the layout is known before theme development starts.