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So I was looking through the rest of the options in the admin section for Settings.  If you recall, a couple of tutorials ago, we covered General Settings and last time we talked about Permalinks.   I had a look through the rest of the sections in Settings (Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Privacy, and Misc.) and came to the conclusion that all of the default settings were fine.  I made a couple of changes to my own blog, but they were more semantical and not required.   I urge you all to check out all the settings yourself and decide if there is anything you would like to change.  Most of the settings are self-explanatory, or provide links to help, but for those that don’t, as always, the best reference is the Codex at WordPress.org.

So I thought, enough already!  I’m sure if you have been patiently following along, you are jonesing to start modifying the look of your blog away from the default. 

Here’s what my blog looked like with the default theme before I switched:

and now of course you can see the new theme, but as I expect it to change over time, here’s what it looked like immediately after the switch:

Better?  I think so, and it’s really just the beginning as I will be making more modifications as time goes on that I will be sharing with you all.

Now there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of WordPress themes out on the Interweb, a great many available for free.  Probably the best place to start looking is at WordPress itself, which has it’s own Theme area.

I have chosen a particular theme called Thematic for my blog, primarily because it has a couple of features that I think will both be useful to me and will maybe help this tutorial.   Thematic bills itself as a WordPress Theme Framework, meaning that it should be highly customizable beyond what you get out of the box so to speak.  Not that what you get isn’t already quite good, but that hopefully, it will be easier then most themes to modify aspects yourself.   One of the issues with using themes is that people tend to fall into 2 camps, those that can use a theme as it comes and be content, and those who find that no matter how great a theme looks, or how many features in has, it still isn’t quite right.   This is the road to creating your own themes, and while that can be an interesting and worthwhile endeavour, I personally find myself reinventing the wheel far to often for my liking.  Frameworks is a big and complex topic, even WordPress frameworks, but suffice to say, I am hopeful that Thematic can provide a strong foundation for customization without having to dig too deep into the guts of the code.

Now installing a theme on your WordPress blog is a pretty straightforward deal.  First you download the theme you are interested in.  They are usually packaged as a zip file, which you unzip and upload the contents to your service provider.   In my case however, as I am writing this post from work, which restricts access to the Internet to common ports I can’t access my service provider to update my theme.

No problem!  A quick search on the interweb turns up a useful plug-in for WordPress which will do exactly what I need.  WordPress plugins are small applications that people write to extend the capabilities of WordPress.   As with themes there are hundreds(if not thousands) of plugins out there.   Also like themes, you can start at Word Press’s Plug-in section, but you can find lots of articles like this one which gives you some good information about why you might want to use specific plugins, and what they do.

In my case I needed to extend WordPress so I could upload a theme .zip file and have it deal with unzipping it on the server in the appropriate section.  Get Theme does just that.  Lucky for me, and unlike themes, WordPress does support the ability to upload a plug-in .zip file directly to the server.  Go to Plugins > Add New and you are presented with a text box and Browse… button.  Simply download the plug-in you want to install to your local computer and then Browse for it here.   Click the Install Now button and WordPress does the rest.

Once you have installed it go to Plugins > Installed. Here you see a page divided into 2 sections, active plugins and inactive plugins.  Activate the Get Theme plug-in if you have installed it and now it appears in the activated section and it is also highlighted in Green.

Now I can get my new theme.   I click on Appearance and in the sub menu I have a new option, Download Themes.  I click on this  and copy the link to the theme I want to install in the Web Address box and click download.  Now if I click Themes in the Appearance sub-menu I have my new theme available to me.   To select it, simply click on the image of it and click on the “Activate <theme name>” link in the top right corner.

When you browse to your site now the new theme should display.  

Hopefully this explains how easy it is to add plugins to extend WordPress and change the themes to give your blog a completely different look.   These two features combined with the large user community creating themes and plugins make WordPress the most powerful blogging system in the world, and in my mind the best choice by far for not just setting up a blog, but the best choice in most cases for almost any type of web site.