The classic theme is much easier to modify than the default Kubric theme. To fully integrate into Glen’s World, I needed two layers of wrappers. The classic theme already provides one empty wrapper called rap. I modified that one to create the star background. I created a second wrapper (calling it rap2) to hold the bulk of the posts and the sidebar menu in front of the green background. Bringing it all together requires a good understanding of the “position” style. What helped the most was understanding that “absolute” isn’t! Absolute is relative to the parent container (as long as the parent is not “static”). Also, you need to remember to ‘clear’ the footer. Otherwise, the footer won’t sink to the bottom.

After getting rap centered on the page and the posts sitting next to the sidebar, the rest was pretty easy. Replace the text header with a graphic; replacing the footer with the usual footer, placing the main menu in the left margin, all fell into place.

Posts are formatted by the <p> tag. The classic theme messes with the spacing between lines and letters. This made the text in the main menu look odd. Deleting the modifications to the spacing corrected that problem.