WordPress MU

I know there are plenty more professional looking websites, but this is my first ever theme created from the ground up. We are a K-12 school district so this is as much a tool as it is a blogging platform. With that in mind, teachers just want to get in and add homework assignments. We also have the curious parent who looks for teacher blogs if they are not listed on the school websites.

I used mootools to add the "Pick a Tool" slide effect. When the icon is clicked, a list of our 32 schools drops down.

This is version 1. I plan to add a sitewide search, but haven't found a good one to use yet (any suggestions???). I am still tweaking the colors and css. It has 4 widget areas. Three in the center and one sidebar.

I had a previous post with Web2.0 Education ajax, but that is no longer valid. This theme replaced that theme.

Let me know what you think. I really got to tweak the colors. If I get it looking good, maybe I'll upload it to the themes at wordpress. Those themes look so much better though. I don't know if I am on that level yet with this one...

http://blog.dearbornschools.org

Nice work! The footer bar is a bit off for me but I reckon you've put together a pretty tasty portal right there.

Hi Farms, The light blue bar in the footer is fluid with your browser (If that was what you were referring to).

Hi Kennibc,
I really liked your site and think it is really a good platform. I don't mean to be rude but can I ask you how you did the site as I want to do the same for my school in India in a region. Would appreciate your help

Nice work.

Or you could add it to wpmudev.org's theme section. I can imagine if you added it to the regualr themes repository, you'd get a ton of emails saying it's broken on single WP. :-/

Thanks Andrea_r. I think that may be the better approach. I did make use of home.php so I imagine it would throw the standard users.

Shaffiehmed, I just created the theme using standard html until I got it to look how I wanted. Then I studied several themes out there and looked to see how they sliced it all up for header.php, page.php, single.php, index.php, footer.php etc. Then I just copied my code from the html page into a pre-existing theme I downloaded. Then, based on what I saw in other themes, I started adding the php code specific to wordpress for things like login, sidebars, loading images, etc. I will post it on the WPMU Theme Site today so you can take a look. It is by no means perfect. This was my first attempt at creating such a theme.

I did use the listall plugin for the very top with the newest, updated, and most active and the featured plugin for the sidebar.

I tried to register at wpmudev.org and it went to the premium site. I guess I did it wrong somehow. In any event, I posted it on a page in my blog...
http://blog.dearbornschools.org/webmaster/iblog-theme/

Download the zip.