After a long, frustrating MAMP install, uninstall, reinstall, screw around with numbers and letters, rinse, repeat, MAMP still refused to work on my computer. I started from scratch on my girlfriend’s laptop, and voila! It worked. Now I could finally start playing around with the documents in my chosen theme, Eureka. I wasn’t feeling optimistic after three hours of banging my head against the wall with MAMP, but I’m glad I pushed through. It ended up being a lot simpler than I’d built it up in my head to be.

I was scared to touch the code at first! I did a lot of Command+F-ing for things like “border” and “background” and changing minor things to see if I was working in the right spot. I kept flipping back to the WordPress codex to try and decipher what I was looking at, and it took me a while to successfully make a change and see it reflected on my local host page. But I think the hardest part is over — now that I’m more comfortable with the workflow, I can concentrate on the actual content, look and functionality of the site. And It was cool to see my work show up right away on the page! I think I’ll be comfortable making cosmetic changes to the theme, but less so writing functions in PHP.

I love that the WordPress documents are separated out by their purpose rather than all being shoved into one CSS or PHP file. I think this will make it easy to find and change exactly what I want to, and the WordPress database system makes the PHP files clean enough to understand…kind of. I’m definitely going to keep studying those codex entries.