I’ve been spending a lot of time inside the inside of wordpress recently, partly by choice, partly by "force". I was requested to make some modifications to an already existing CMS to allow it to be used for online publishing, but the time available and my experience with the product in question were both very slim so I put forward a case to use wordpress and to do a total conversion instead. Client wasn’t so keen, client went away, client thought about it, client came back, wordpress happened. Writing a theme for wordpress that looks nothing like wordpress was a lot easier than I thought, and I look forward to spending some time (when I’ve removed the my study from boxes) into redoing my own site in a similar style – neuro sorta had a theme similar to the one I want, for a while. I want my content to be presented differently depending how old it is:
- Loads of space, bigger fonts, and more obvious, perhaps with a custom background colour and border
- Smaller, but still full width, with less emphasis, a stock background and no fancy border
- Left Column, 1/4width of page
- Middle Column, 1/4width of page
- Right Column, 1/4width of page
and a seperate column on the right hand side, full width, bar the header, that carries the usual wordpress gubbins. I’m also liking the idea of theme highlighting based upon category, so I will play with that too, I think 
Like most of my projects, I’ll probably never get off my arse and write it, but I think this recent (paid) excursion into wordpress hackery has given me the kick in the crotch I needed to get off my backside and work on my own site for a change! Maybe.
The site in question is CK:ClicK. We also have plans to take our wordpress changes into a grand unified plugin and release it open source style "at some point" soon-ish.