I am basing my newer themes on zBench. This page talks about customisations I have undertaken or am in the process of implementing. It includes stuff about header images, the front page, (mainly full articles vs. snippets) and favicons.

Header Images

The theme editor panel allows one to assign an image file to the header. Since this was one of the motives for moving the blog to wordpress, I really should get on with it.

Front Page

The default front-page is implemented using index.php.
For the wiki, I should make a new front page, maybe, this page at themelab explains how to do this simply.
This article Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure, recommends the use of summaries on the front page, as opposed to the full articles. During July, I wrote some exceptionally long articles, and published them out of order  which really made finding content really hard, and even following the story hard.
This wiki also uses the read more  features of WordPress. I researched this, with help at the wordpress community forums, I started a thread called, use of Insert More with zbench, which discuss the use of ‘insert break’ button and the dashboard settings. This page at the wordpress codex, called, Customizing the Read More explains how to use the read more features.
In October 2013, I decided to revise the Read More functionality, I installed the advanced-excerpt plugin in order to have some say on length of the the excerpt. This gives some issues around the hypertext link and decoration for the hypertext link. The rendering of the » symbol varies, and for the default look in zbench it is managed via a css class rule which is quite pretty.
I also installed the featured picture widget and set up a CSS rule to force the pictures to aligh left.
I decided to emulate the comments page by having horizontal lists detailing the catagories and tags for each entry.
I get them using the following functions,

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_tag_list
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_category_list

<!--- entry customisation code by dfl  16 Oct 2013 --->
 <div>
   <span class="post-info-bottom">
   <span class="post-info-category">
       <?php echo get_the_category_list(','); ?>
   </span></span>
   <span class="post-info-tags"><?php echo get_the_tag_list(' ',', '); ?></span>
 </div>

The post-info-* classes are part of zbench, the use of get_the_category_list realises a class called .post-categories. I have defined the following CSS rule

    .post-categories ul li {list-style-type: none; display: inline; }

which makes the category list behave properly.

Fav Icons

I have used the HTML editor in the dashboard to insert the favicon code lines. I used this page, http://is.gd/SHiZED as a guide which also points at a favicon maker.