I think it’s time to break out the theme chainsaw and start doing some renovations. *pokes website*

Right now I’m running a modified/tweaked version 2.4.2 of the Mystique Theme written by digitalnature. This is an older version, but I’m reluctant to upgrade because the theme was completely rebuilt and I’d have to start over from scratch.

Assuming the time I’ve spent tweaking Mystique so far is a sunk cost, I’m faced with either retracing my steps with Mystique or starting from scratch. Since there are a lot of things that Mystique does that I don’t need (or want) it to do— I’m going with scratch(ish).

Starting from !Scratch

Since I’m still a newbie to the world of CSS and PHP, I’m starting with a ‘blank’ theme instead of literally empty files. This will give me a base to build from, while hopefully keeping the things I have to remove/delete/undo to a minimum.

I’m using the Boilerplate 3.0 theme by Aaron T. Grogg, based on the work of Paul Irish, Divya Manian, and Elliot Jay Stocks and I’ll be modeling the site using a Child Theme instead of modifying the theme directly.

I’ll be documenting as I go, since it’s much easier to figure out where I went wrong with a paper trail, thus expect posts about the various design choices and how to pull them off from scratch. (Hopefully)

Thus things may be a little, hmm, ‘unpolished’ for a bit if you catch the site while I’m swaping back and forth between the themes.

If anyone has any suggestions for what they’d like to see on the site or what they’d like to get rid of, please leave me a comment! 🙂