designguide theme
Welcome to the Melody Theme Designer's Guide. This guide will introduce theme designers, or developers, depending upon how you see yourself, to the process of creating a brand new Melody theme from scratch. It will introduce you to the Melody templating language, show you how to create theme options for your users to tweak endlessly, show you how to package your theme for distribution, and at the end, provide you with a cookbook for frequent theme recipes - like feeds, commenting and more.
One of our most important goals in creating Melody was to create a theme framework that was not only easy to use, but one that required very little technical knowledge. For example, if you know HTML and CSS, then you can build a theme for Melody. And while Melody may itself be written in the Perl programming language, no theme designer has to know anything about Perl, much less how to program in it, in order to build a theme in Melody. Let me reiterate: to build a website in Melody, there is no Perl knowledge required. In fact, there is no requirement you know any programming language whatsoever.
Furthermore, Melody designers are free to use whatever tools, programs and applications they want in order to assist them. For example, many of Melody's designers like to use TextMate for Mac OS X, others emacs, and I am sure there is someone out there who even likes to use vim (crazy people if you ask me). The point is, you don't need to constrain yourself to a small textarea box on a web page in order to build a theme or edit templates. Use whatever tools you are most comfortable with.
Finally, Melody has evolved to provide designers with the ability to create a theme that is easy to support as well. What does that mean? For starters, it means that themes are easy to install, and once installed, they can be easily configured by users. It also means that the people behind Melody feel that the need for a user to edit templates should be a last resort; and optimally, a user should never even have to look at a theme's templates much less edit them.
- Theme Packaging
- Your config.yaml and You - a Primer for Melody Designers
- The Basics: Building Your First Theme
- Index and Archive Templates
- Modules, Widgets and Widget Sets
- System Templates
- Global Templates
- Theme Options
- Preference Bundles
- Theme Documentation TODO
- Finishing Touches
Category: Guide
Tags: theme design, Table of Contents
Questions, comments, can't find something? Let us know at our community outpost on Get Satisfaction.
- Author: Byrne Reese
- Edited by: Violet Bliss Dietz