Creating WordPress themes for open source studio

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to design and develop a set of personal blog site themes that explore different dimensions of WordPress, an open source content management system. The themes should be custom designed and written, capable of fulfilling the technological, functional, and aesthetic needs of the art students in the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) and it should be fully tested and implemented within Open Source Studio (OSS), a project of ADM that provides students with online, collaborative space for research, assignments and portfolio development. To achieve the objective, I went through the whole Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) of gathering requirements from OSS users, analyzing the requirements, designing based on the requirements, developing to implement the designs, testing, deploying, gathering feedback and fine-tuning based on the feedback. As the result, I have successfully developed two themes, Plum Blossom and Palette, both of which meet the requirements of OSS users yet present different styles. They are both deployed on OSS now and available to ADM students for use. There are currently six students using my themes and they are satisfied with the results. This report will introduce each step of the development life cycle and explain how I achieved my objectives.