Customizing WordPress's Twenty Seventeen Theme
As I mentioned in my first post on this new blog, this isn't my first rodeo with WordPress or blogging in general. I have actually used a number of different content management systems in the past like Drupal, older versions of WordPress, and even forum platforms like ProBoards, phpBB, and vBulletin.
All of these tools are amazingly simple to use in comparison to how much they offer to their users. However, this latest version of Wordpress (version 4.8) has been above an beyond a great experience.
I value the ability to make quick and accurate customization to my website, and with WordPress's huge library of plugins and their latest customization features like Additional CSS, it has been easier than ever to do just that. I wanted to share with you all a few of the specific customizations I made, and just how simple it was to do those things.
Adjusting the Social Links Footer
One of my top goals for this site was to have a single location for all of my various social media profiles. WordPress's new Social Links Menu makes it super easy to achieve this, however their default implementation was not very good looking in my opinion. Specifically, they made the 'social-navigation' section have a width of 36%, with a max-width of 1000px for the container. This means the menu can have at most 5 icons before wrapping to a second line, and even less if the window is smaller.
I wanted to fix this. I wanted the Social Links Menu to take the entire bottom footer space, and I also wanted the links to align right, so that it would be right underneath my Home Page text. This also meant I needed to get rid of the "Proudly powered by WordPress" text. I am not against giving credit where credit is due, but not if it means compromising a good look.
To achieve my goals, I made the following simple CSS update in the Additional CSS settings:
.site-info {
display: none;
}
.social-navigation {
width: 100%;
text-align: right;
}
Here is the final result: