Eleven40 with Beecrafty Home Page

[AnitaC]

I have a client who would like to use Eleven40 but wants the home page as a full width layout and post thumbnails that work like Beecrafty. Can someone walk me through how I can do this? I am not sure if I am supposed to replace some Eleven40 home.php code with anything from Beecrafty's home.php and if Eleven40's home page will remain responsive. I haven't instructed them to purchase the theme yet because I don't know if I'll be able to pull off what they want.

Thanks in advance.

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[Chris Cree]

With Genesis child themes you can mix and match code from various themes. It's one of the big advantages of using a theme framework like Genesis.

For example, you can use the home.php from Beecrafty with the rest of the code from Eleven40. You have to make sure any functions referenced in the file you are bringing in are either present or you must add them to your existing theme.

An example of what else you would have to bring across in your case is the widget areas used on the home page. Look at which widget areas are called in the home.php file of Beecrafty. Compare that to the widget area setup section in the functions.php file of Eleven40. For the ones that aren't already in the Eleven40 functions.php file, copy them over from the Beecrafty functions.php file.

It's not uncommon to get a "white screen" with an error message when Frankensteining themes. Don't let that throw you. Look at the error message and track down the problem file. The error message will tell you either the line number where the typo is, or the function name that is the causing the problem.

Then you can either fix the typo, or go find the function from the theme you are stealing code from and add it to your new hybrid theme.

After it is "working" then you have to add the CSS rules to your style.css file to make everything look the way you want it.

It may sound like a convoluted process. But trust me it is much faster and easier than the old way of doing things before we had frameworks like Genesis and we had to create every new theme from scratch.

[AnitaC]

Thanks Chris! This is my project for the afternoon. I will report back if I have any problems.

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[Susan]

You'll do fine, Anita! I set up my blog using two themes (Modern Blogger and Pretty Young Thing) when I first started out with StudioPress, and it was pretty straightforward (just a matter of experimenting with what I wanted from each theme).

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