Have you heard of Delicious? It’s a great way of organising bookmarks and memorable sites so that you can easily access them no matter where you are, what computer you’re on or what browser you’re using. We’ve created a bda work account, which makes things more fun because we can discover sites that other people here have tagged which we might otherwise not have come across.

For example, I might find a site with a heap of free icons; I can then tag it with ‘icons / resources / whatever’ and then when someone else is looking for some icons, they will (hopefully) see the site I’ve tagged. Likewise if someone is reading a site about bullet proof rounded corner methods, they could tag it with ’roundedcorners / tutorial / whatever’ and when I’m feeling a little bit nuts, I can see the site and voila! Rounded corners! :

The easiest way to start using Delicious is with the firefox add on. Tagging / bookmarking a site is then as easy as either a) right-clicking and choosing ‘bookmark this page in delicious…’ or b) hitting the big ‘tag’ button next to the address bar.

If you think we’ll enjoy the site, tag it with for:thinkbda and it’ll show up in our suggested sites list.

If Firefox isn’t your thing, or if you don’t want to install the add-on, there are other tools you can use.

Happy bookmarking!

Come and dress a Christmas Elf! We’re running a draw that lasts until Midnight on the 22nd of December. All you have to do to be in with the chance of winning a magnum of Champagne is submit an elf.

Good luck, and have fun!

All Wordpress installations start out the same; what makes them unique is their skin, or ‘theme’. A theme is a set of files (or ‘templates’) which control how your content is pulled from your database and displayed to your visitors. The bare minimum that a theme requires to work is an index.php file and a style.css.

Index.php is the main ‘template’ that Wordpress relies on – there are numerous files that can take importance over this file, but in the absence of extra files, Wordpress will default back to the main index.php to display your site.

Style.css contains the basic information about your theme (name, author, version, etc.) but also contains all the CSS for your theme as well.

If you’re familiar with CSS already, creating your theme’s stylesheet will be a fairly straightforward process. What will be slightly trickier is the index.php file, as this doesn’t just contain HTML – it needs to be told where and which information to pull from your database, and this happens via the use of ‘template tags’. The best place to learn about template tags is the Wordpress codex.

Unless your site has a minimal amount of content or your theme is very basic, you’ll find that you’ll soon have more requirements than index.php can cope with. If you want certain content to only be displayed on certain pages, or if you want your posts to look different to your pages, etc., then for the sake of file size and readability, it will be a good idea to start adding extra files to your themes.

Common files are as follows:

• header.php; this contains everything found at the ‘top’ of each page, such as navigation, title, etc.
• footer.php; this contains everything found at the ‘bottom’ of each page, such as the copyright statement, etc/
• sidebar.php; your sidebar can contain anything and everything from your archives to your wishlist.
• single.php; this controls how individual blog entries are displayed.
• page.php; this controls how your pages are displayed.
• comments.php; this is perhaps the most common file after header.php, footer.php, and sidebar.php. It controls how comments on your blog are displayed.

Wordpress is an extremely versatile CMS, in that once you have the basic index.php and style.css sorted, your options are then pretty much limitless. Your Wordpress theme can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.

Further reading

• Theme development (WP codex)
• Stepping into templates (WP codex)
• Template heirarchy (WP codex)