VMware Clarity based WordPress Theme – v0.1

A couple of days ago I saw a tweet from Cody De Arkland showing his new tweaked VMware Clarity based theme on his website.

Staying up until 3am to get the brisket on, so what do I do? Work on tuning up https://t.co/YDiFkGIKLY with some better @VMwareClarity styling! Check out the differences below! Subtle changes but I think it’s a lot better. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/6sYnuBahwI

— Cody De Arkland (@Codydearkland) June 17, 2018

Cody has gone down the route of using Hugo and AWS, which I respect, but just seems like too much work for me at the moment! I am familiar with WordPress, and Simon is barely computer literate at the best of times, so I can’t ask him to start writing in markdown. But I did want some of this Clarity goodness – so I set about learning how to create a WordPress theme, and how to integrate Clarity with this.

I was massively helped by the post Cody put up detailing how he went about incorporating Clarity into his code, and the Clarity docs themselves are nice and easy to understand, so I have fumbled my way though to where I am now. In the spirit of eating my own dogfood, I have switched DefinIT over to Clarity 0.1!

You can, if feeling brave, get my theme code from github here: https://github.com/sammcgeown/wordpress-clarity

What works:

• Navigation – you need to add a menu to the Clarity Header Navigation
• Theme Colours – you can select the Light or Dark Clarity Theme
• Header Colour – you can select header-1 to header-6, which will change the header colour scheme
• Logo upload – you can upload a 40px by 100px logo, to replace the default clarity logo
• Pagination – this works, I think
• Widgets – you can add widgets to the Clarity Cards Sidebar
• Search
• RSS – the code icon in the top right links to the sites RSS feed

Still to do:

• Some general layout issues (scrollbars everywhere?)
• Anything to do with comments
• Social sharing links
• More than basic post/page display
• Better pagination
• Forms
• Etc…

It’s a 0.1 release people, it’s buggy – use at your own risk. If you do use it, please hit me up on twitter (@sammcgeown) and let me know how it’s going, any requests etc. And if you’re interested in contributing to the theme, send a pull request!

Any feedback or broken things on this site, please let me know via twitter again!