Exploring the Basics of Creating a Theme

The previous section of this chapter lays out some basic skills for editing a theme’s HTML by examining the code, locating an element’s class or ID, and then editing the styles in the HTML and CSS. It also covers adding custom CSS to override your theme’s CSS (in the Appearance section at the bottom of the Customize Appearance page). If any of those skills seem difficult or confusing to you, you might want to postpone creating your own Tumblr theme until you’ve had a bit of practice with HTML and CSS. In addition, if you plan to develop complex Tumblr themes, you might also want to take a look at some tutorials in JavaScript, jQuery, and PHP.

Tip.eps You can find all kinds of wonderful free tutorials about HTML and CSS online. Two of my personal favorite sites are www.w3schools.com and http://reference.sitepoint.com/html . You may also want to check out HTML, XHTML & CSS For Dummies, 7th Edition, by Ed Tittel and Jeff Noble.

Keep in mind that the more you know, the better you’ll be able to design and develop your own Tumblr themes — or at least get familiar with the structure of existing themes in Tumblr’s Theme Garden.

Gathering the tools you need

Before you develop or build your theme, you need to come up with a design for it. That involves design skills and working knowledge of one or more drawing, web-graphic, and photo-editing software programs. ...

Get Tumblr For Dummies Portable Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.