[How To] Develop your Own Thesis Skin

There are many free Thesis skins available for download but for the one who wants develop or build his/her own Thesis skin should know some of the theme building basics. The Naked Thesis Skin is almost a blank skin and is made for the sake of skin customization.

Thesis theme provides Thesis Skin manager which allows you to switch to another skin whenever you want. If you want to build your own Thesis Skin, follow the steps below:

1. Create a directory and put it in the “custom/skins” folder.
2. Create function.php for writing your custom functions on thesis hooks.
3. Create base.css for applying custom styling to your skin.
4. You may need some images, create a folder for skin images and thesis-all-options.dat file for importing all options that you have set.

Here is an example of my Naked-Thesis-Skin folder,

Customizing base.css :

First of all we need to specify the name, version, author, etc like we do in the normal themes.

So following lines goes at the very first in base.css

/*
Skin Name: Naked Thesis Theme
Skin URI: http://example.com
Description: This is a free blank thesis skin for customization.
Version: 1.0
Author: rtCamp
Author URI: http://example.com
*/

Customizing functions.php :

We are adding our own CSS file in the theme so we need to include it.

Here is how you can include base.css

add_action('wp_head', 'rt_base_css');
function rt_base_css() { ?>
    SKINURL; ?>base.css" rel="stylesheet" />
}

And now that you are done with base.css and functions.php, you can now do your customizations. Look for the available list of hooks that thesis provides for customizations.

I have created a thesis blank skin for customization. Download Naked Thesis Skin and customize it in your own way.

Link: Download Naked Thesis Skin