Cleaning up a theme

rather than approach it as what you can remove, just test each rule by commenting out the entire rule and looking through your site (all pages) to see if you see changes. I mean, some of it is obviously either cosmetic (in which case, you can pick and choose your own properties and values) and some of it is layout. If the author of the style sheet it worth his/her salt, they’ve organized the style sheet and commented it to make things clear.

But everybody has different ways of working in css. Me, I am a minimalist class user… I only resort to classes if nothing else works and prefer to use ID’d regions and contextual selectors…eg.

#sidebar ul {} or #footer p

and I tend to rely heavily on inheritance, cascade and specificity. I detest seeing font-family repeated over and over, but hey, that’s just me.

Anyway, I am a beginner at WP and php, but am in the process of taking the default template and turning it into my own template, pretty much completely rewriting the style sheet, for sure. I don’t much care for gigantic header.php layouts and find a lot of templates boringly the same.

I hope to complete mine and share it with pride when done.

D

Another thing you can do is to put all of the browser hacks in a separate stylesheet and remove them from your style.css. Then import the hacks stylesheet in your header. That way they are out of the way but still available to the browsers that need them.

Nice theme, by the way.