Editing themes; a newbie?

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Hello and thanks for reading. Sorry if this has been asked and answered. I did try looking, although I could have easily overlooked an answer.

I have been playing around with some of the free themes to try and get a feel for everything. I cannot seem to find a way to change the header. For example I have the LoadFoOv2 theme installed. I cannot find a way to remove "My Site" and replace it with my logo and name. I realize that it is free so maybe that's just not possible, or is this something that I could edit in another program such as DW and then upload the changes?

If adding/replacing headers or photos is just not possible with free themes then what about the others. I like the Luminosity theme but I hate to purchase it if I cannot edit it to my taste. If I bought Luminosity I would like to obviously add my logo to the top and then change the orange "sunburst" to a green or just nothing at all.

Sorry for the simple question and thanks again.

 
elyon replied on at Permalink Reply
elyon
To create your own theme, you can basically make it in HTML, rename it to .php, then paste in a tiny snippet in the <HEAD/>, at the bottom of the page, and wherever you want to be able to add blocks. That's about it.

Other than that, many of the themes follow a structure which uses a header.php and footer.php file, which is reused among several page type files. In this way, the basics for the theme are reused for every page type, but the mechanics of changing the internal page structure is applied differently depending on what you type of page it is.

You should be able to edit the header file (or the relevant page type file) to change the theme. They might also be pulling in a scrapbook item for the site title, or maybe its a variable somewhere? I don't remember, but if you want a graphic up there, it might be best to just edit the HTML (PHP) yourself.

One other thing to bear in mind, is that you'll need to throw a PHP snippet before your paths (like for loading an image or CSS file), but if you're editing a theme it might already be in there. It's "$c -> getThemePath ();" or something like that. It should be in practically every theme
ThemeGuru replied on at Permalink Reply
ThemeGuru
If you use dreamweaver check out this little collection of snippets...

http://concrete5-japan.org/dreamweaver/en/...