Today I upgraded to WordPress 3.3.2 and worked a bit on this site’s design.

The backup documentation seemed a bit intimidating at first, but it turns out that my hosting provider offers an option to automate backups via FTP to a server in a different location. We’re doing that once a day now.

So I just pushed the upgrade button and that was it.

Then I created a Child Theme which I dubbed ‘Twenty Eleven Schuurmudgeon’. I simply created a new directory via FTP next to the directory ‘twentyeleven’ and called it ‘twentyeleven-schuurmudgeon’. Populated it with the following files: ‘footer.php’, ‘functions.php’ and ‘style.css’.

• ‘footer.php’ mentions Creative Commons Attribution and the name of the child theme;
• ‘functions.php’ links the new favicon image to the site;
• ‘style.css’ defines exceptions and additions to the parent theme’s styles.

I then dropped the ‘favicon.ico’ file to the root directory.

After activating the child theme in the WordPress admin dashboard, the system reverted to some of the default settings of the parent theme, so I had to set them again manually:

• Background color;
• Upload background image and set the tiling;
• Not show the header text.

I have installed a plugin, ‘Twenty Eleven Theme Extensions’ by MozTools that makes it easy to improve a few specific design issues. It let me reduce the height of the header image to 160 pixels. So I then uploaded a new header image, size 1000×160 pixels.

The child theme’s style.css definitions includes, among other things, a 1-pixel border to the left of the page div, and a drop shadow to the right and bottom.

When I recently added Joe Blogger as an additional author to this site, WordPress started inserting a “author-info” div  beteween the entry and the comment section of each post, which I found a bit disturbing. I guess that happens automagically when the site has more than one user who has published something – there was another user, Admin, who hadn’t published anything.

Now I made the  “author-info” div disappear by adding the following style definition in the child theme’s ‘style.css’ file:

#author-info {
    display: none;
}

That’s about it for now.