Building Elemental 2: Getting Started

As I mentioned in February I had a conundrum – I wasn’t sure how to make changes to my theme Elemental without breaking peoples sites. Thankfully the people who read my site are super clever and suggested I create a version 2 and so, over the last month or so, that’s exactly what I have started doing.

I am currently in the process of ripping Elemental apart – and near enough rewriting it from scratch – and I thought I would write a bit about the process and the ideas behind what I am doing and why.

Objectives#

Web design and development has come a long way since I started building Elemental – and in a similar vein my own skills and knowledge have improved as well – and as such there are a host of things I want to do with the theme that I couldn’t do before. Since I now have this opportunity to rewrite everything I am going to take the time to do things properly.

The main things I plan to do are:

• Simplify
• Make better use of built in WordPress functionality
• Use modern web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc)
• Use WordPress programming standards
• Optimise
• Build in support for popular WordPress plugins

Over the next couple of months I will be writing about Elemental 2 and the design and development process. This is so that I can get feedback on what I am doing from the wider WordPress community. If there’s anything in particular you would like to know – what I am doing, or how/ why I am doing it – then please do let me know in the comments.