For the past week or so I’ve been playing around with a TwentyEleven child theme for a soccer team project I am fiddling with.  For the most part I’ve been able to accomplish what I want using a TwentyEleven child theme.  Using TwentyEleven as a base for this project isn’t bad but it certainly is different than using a theme framework (e.g. Thematic).

Last week I had posted that I didn’t care much for how the header was constructed and after working with it for a week, I still feel that way.  TwentyEleven has a number of filters and actions but customizing the header isn’t among them.  I also find it very odd how the default behavior is to use featured images as the header if there is one available.  I can’t imagine what application that turns out to be a good thing.  Fortunately it is fairly easy to disable that and set your own header.

TwentyEleven has a showcase template that is sort of like a magazine style but not exactly.  For it to work it requires that posts be tagged as “sticky” which also means they appear at the top of the list in a standard chronological post view.  What I really wanted was functionality like the showcase for the latest articles and let that view become the default home page.  I was able to accomplish this by copying the showcase.php file from TwentyEleven into my child theme directory and calling it latest-news.php.  I now have a new template that shows the five latest posts using the featured content slider which TwentyEleven has built into the showcase template.

Now that I have it working, I am finding that images in the showcase template are wonky and adding a featured image really messes things up.  I am sure I’ll figure it out but the decisions the theme designer(s) made in this area are odd.  It’s like having an 80% solution but the other 20% will take a while to work out.

The one thing I am pretty happy with though is how well it seems to work on my iPad and I didn’t have to do anything special to make it work.  It just works which is nice.  Once I am done with this I will probably turn it into a generic soccer theme but for now it is really only useful for CASL teams.