Hi folks. I'm very new to WordPress but I've been a software developer or architect on a variety of technologies for about 15 years now and I'm familiar (not expert) with the concepts of HTML, CSS, and the stuff that goes on under the hood in the back end.
Before I had a blog set up, I wrote a couple of articles in Google Docs with the intention of getting them up on some blog. I figured blogger/blogspot (currently set up on a subdomain of my website via Google apps) should work seamlessly, but it turns out that I was drastically overestimating blogspot. Wow, what a chunk. A bit of hunting led me to WordPress and I'm fine with getting onboard with it. If I can get my articles to show up as they should, I'll be getting the domain mapping upgrade to make it appear under my company website.
The articles are straightforward in the formatting department, all they have is a few levels of headings (format applied by the style control in Google Docs), and the occasional use of bold, italics, and a few passages of sample code which is indented and rendered in Courier New font.
I've selected the Journalist 1.9 theme, and I'm happy with how it looks. I just need the ability to apply similar formatting to my blog posts as what I've got now in my documents.
I'm assuming that I'll have to copy & paste as unformatted text, because the other approaches I tried all resulted in tons of span and div tags with styles defined and applied right in the post - so if I wanted to tweak the theme in the future those changes would not apply to the imported articles.
What I need some assurance/guidance on is that I'll be able to actually define and apply these basic styles to the posts once I've got my plain text starting point. What I need to be able to apply is just:
1) Hierarchical numbered lists.
2) A "code" style that applies an indent and font. Good if some border or shading can be applied to that section.
3) A "note" style that applies and indent and italics. Also good if I can apply some border or shading.
4) 3-4 levels of headings where I can specify font, size, and bold/italics for each. I don't care if I have to do the numbering manually.
This seems pretty modest. Do I really have to get the CSS upgrade to do it? And then do I really have to go editing CSS by hand to make it work?
Assuming I do: once I've defined those styles, how do I apply them? Will there be options in the WYSIWG/Visual editor, or do I have to add markup to the post via the HTML editor?
Any help to get going with this would be very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Phil Martin.