Once installed (theoretically taking you 5 minutes, but I've been assured that's only if your sysadmins are brainless lugs and don't care about security) Wordpress provides a back-end to manage your site and its contents. This occurs at two levels - the straightforward, everyday content management and layout, and the nitty-gritty of automating the html and css.
Logging in presents you with a dashboard containing reports on any recent activity on the site, a quick post facility and access to the site's controls over posts, pages, links, media and comments. This lets you create, upload, edit and rearrange things to your heart's content from within your web browser - such a soothing relief after having to run at least three separate applications (including ssh and ftp) whenever I wanted to modify one of my old sites. What I'm interested in at the moment, however is the Themes.
Wordpress allows you - if you so desire - to entirely wash your hands of all things codey. You can create your contents in a WYSIWYG editor, pick a 'Theme' (layout, widgets, colours, backgrounds etc) and a host of .php will edit everything together for you.
There are countless myriad themes out there, even if you only count the free ones. After window-shopping a few over the past couple of weeks, I've tentatively selected Minimatica from One Designs, as it has a really interesting gallery structure. I had hoped to use static pages for much of the content, but it looks like I might need to instead create another kind of blog-post template, and remove some of the date referencing. There are other changes which I will list later (eg. changing the solid blocks for transparent ones), but for the time-being, I have a page which looks a little like this:
I'll need to get deep in the .php files to isolate the relevant code, but it should be do-able. Obviously there's a lot of work required to make it look anything like this:
but strangely, I'm looking forward to it!
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