Poojan (Wagh) Blog

Part of the reason I used Thematic at CircuitDesign.info was because of its ability to do a child theme (See: How I used a WordPress Child Theme To Redesign My Blog The Smart Way).

Recently, I upgraded Thematic, and some of my custom RSS feeds disappeared. (I have 3 different RSS feeds at circuitdesign.info depending on the clientele.) Unfortunately, I didn’t take advantage of this function, so I lost the two custom feeds.

This time, I finally made a custom child theme to support these RSS feeds. The important thing I needed to do was add a couple RSS link to the wp_head function.

I created a new theme directory (thematic-wagh), and added two files to it: style.css and functions.php. The style.css file contains:

/*
Theme Name: Thematic-Wagh
Theme URI: http://circuitdesign.info/
Description: Child Theme for Thematic
Author: PoojanWagh
Author URI: http://www.6waghs.net/poojanblog/
Template: thematic
Version: 0.1
.
This work is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
.
*/

import url("../thematic/style.css");

Basically, it’s empty and just has the magic incantation to tell WordPress that everything is defined by Thematic. The functions.php file has:

<?php

function childtheme_rss() { ?>
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalogAnalogProfessional" title="Posts for Analog Professionals" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalogLayperson" title="Tutorial and General Interest Posts" />

<?php }

add_action('wp_head', 'childtheme_rss');

?>

So, as promised, it just adds to RSS links to the wp_head definition. That was real cool, and it took only 15 minutes to figure out. It would have taken less time, except I got stuck on a quirk in the style.css definition. When I tried:

Template: Thematic

It didn’t work. WordPress said that template didn’t exist.  Note that the Thematic directory has the following definition:

THEME NAME: Thematic
THEME URI: http://themeshaper.com/thematic-for-wordpress/
DESCRIPTION: A <a href="http://themeshaper.com/">ThemeShaper</a> theme framework based on work in <a href="http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/"> The Blueprint CSS Framework</a>, and by <a href="http://www.pearsonified.com/">Chris Pearson</a>, <a href="http://andy.wordpress.com/">Andy Skelton</a>, <a href="http://www.plaintxt.org/">Scott Allan Wallick</a> and many, many others. Please visit the<a href="http://themeshaper.com/forums/">ThemeShaper Forums</a> if you have any questions about Thematic.
VERSION: 0.6.3
AUTHOR: Ian Stewart
AUTHOR URI: http://themeshaper.com/
TAGS:three columns,two columns,fixed width,simple,seo,microformats,widgets,framework,options page,hooks,filters,valid XHTML,valid CSS
.
This work, like WordPress, is released under GNU General Public License, version
 2 (GPL).
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
.
*/

So, I thought refering to Thematic with a capital T would work. However, for some reason, you have to make it all lowercase:

Template: thematic

Go figure. Nonetheless, I’m really happy to have stood on the shoulders of giants and to inherit their future advances,