UI and CSS are skills I'm not very strong at. I keep myself mostly away from it. I have worked on many Mura sites in last few months but never did anything with creating/implementing themes. I have been impressed with Mura CMS in many ways and wanted to get my hands dirty with themes, to see how easy or difficult it is to create one. At the same time I have been wanting to update the look of BlogOnRIA since the day I launched it! So, this was a perfect opportunity for me to learn theme creation in Mura by migrating this blog to Mura and implementing a new design.
The result is what you see! The migration could not have been any easier.
The Design
The first step was finding a design template that I liked. This was the hardest part. I couldn't find any thing that I completely liked so, I took concept from multiple ones, made some of my own changes and then came up with the look that you see now. I'm very happy with what I came up with.
The Theme
Next step was creating the Mura theme. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was. All I had to do was to follow simple directions here. By following the step by step directions I was able to create a Mura theme for my design in no time.
The Content
The content migration is always the most time consuming part. But guess what, Mura has a solution for that too! When you create a remote feed in Mura, it also let's you import all the content from the remote feed to anywhere in your content tree. So, I created a blog portal and imported all the pages here. Couple of minutes later all my existing content were sucked in with proper title, summary and content! I just had to categorize them manually. One thing that Mura lacks in no comment listing/editing in the back end. So, I had to enter all the comments from the front-end and then update the date/time in the database. I had just a hand full of comments so, this was not a big deal.
Then I added RSS feed for blog by creating an local index. All local indexes has RSS feed by default.
Mura also doesn't have SEO friendly category URL. So, I created a custom component to handle that. Beyond that, I just added few things like recent comments, recent tweet, contact form and the blog was ready to go!
I hope you like the new look!
