Chasing a random whim, I decided to check if there was an existing WordPress theme to mimic the BeOS 5 desktop. If there is one, I can’t find it. As I’ve detailed before, I’ve been learning to hack WordPress. So I thought, perhaps this is a chance for me to write my first WordPress theme.
Enter BePress. At first, I began this project as a 100% table-free CSS/XHTML project. After a few hours of tinkering, however, and after looking into some old code Eugenia wrote, it became clear to me that going table-less will not render the result I’d like to see. Perhaps for a 2.0 version I’ll pursue that goal. In the meantime, for my 0.2 roll I replaced my divs and spans with tables and got a nice, smooth BeOS table-like interface. Behold, BePress.
Although far from complete – complete to me means all pages of the theme are present and rendering properly – I’m feeling that it’s a nice start. I’m also getting more comfortable digging into WordPress. It turns out that writing a theme is exceptionally easy once you understand how The Loop works.
I expect to continue to mess with this for another week or two before I look into WordPress hosting it for download. I don’t see any reason why not to share it with the world, if there’s actually still anyone out there with a nostalgia for the BeOS who wants to theme their WordPress blog.
i miss beos!