My grand plan: I am hoping / trying to use Atahualpa to design a base blog layout/style of a prototype blog site. I would then either hard-code the modifications for future implementations or use a script to copy the modifications out to other blogs. I plan to then import the remaining blogs using this new base theme that is my modified Atahualpa theme and settings. What I liked about this idea was that I could have a good base setup and then hopefully still be able to tweak individual blogs as needed rather than having to install the Atahualpa theme and make the same changes over and over again to make them consistent.
Development platform: WP-mu on WAMP.
Production platform: WP-mu on Linux
Objective: Import multiple blogs from Movable Type to WP-mu using a consistent base style.
My Questions:
1- Should I plan to hack the code that creates the entries in the wp_options so that upon activation, the new settings take effect or should I plan to script this using a sql code after activation? (I think I prefer the former)
2- For example there is this value in the table options table after I update the theme: [224 0 bfa_ata_layout_width 99% yes]. Where can I change 99% to 984px; so it is the default that shows on the theme options panel and then is what is loaded in the options table? Or Where exactly can I edit the default options that show up in the theme options appearance admin panel?
3- I see that each blog gets a new options table, but that the custom options are not loaded until they are updated from the theme options appearance admin panel. Does this mean that I will need to go through this step for each blog? Or I guess I could run a sql script against the tables. Any advice on this?
4- I read that the css.php should not be modified if upgrade issues are to be avoided. So should I use “one of the many text areas in the theme options to apply CSS to specific parts of the layout.”? I am not clear on how to do this and apply it to multiple blogs. My goal is to have a custom base theme that then can be modified only on occasion.
Thanks in advance?