Okay, so you're a whiz-bang designer and you've developed a theme that is light years beyond anything that I can accomplish. Kudos to you. In addition to your excellent skill, you've learned from a young age that it is only right to share the fruits of your labor with others and now want to make your theme s available to the rest of us design-challenged ogres. Here's how you go about doing just that.
Let's say that you've made a theme and you want to call it "Ultracool Theme I Thought Up". I like the sound of that. First, let's make a directory and replace all of the spaces with underscores, mkdir Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up.
Now, all of the images that you want to use with this new theme, copy all of those into the directory you just made, cp image1.jpg image2.jpg Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up
Not bad, we're almost done. Now comes the tricky part, the style sheet.
For naming conventions sake, all style sheets must be called style.css That's not really that big of a deal because each style sheet will reside in it's own theme folder, so there's not a chance it'll be confused with a style for another theme. If you name your style sheet something other than style.css it won't work from within the menu or from the commandline flags and I won't approve it's use.
Additionally, each style sheet should have it's name commented on the first line of the style sheet, for example, our new theme Ultracool Theme I Thought Up should have /*Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up*/ on the first line of style.css followed by a blank line. After the blank line, any copyright information, or any other information you want to include in the theme can be included in comments before the body of the style sheet. You can also include a README or CREDITS file(s) in the directory these will not be stripped out.
Any work you contribute will retain all accreditation to you, as submitted by you. I'm not here to steal your work, I'm just providing an outlet for creativity.
So, let's review. You should have a directory named after your theme, with spaces replaced with underscores, containing all of the associated images with your theme, style.css, and optionally a README and/or CREDITS file(s).
Now, let's pack it up.
I prefer all theme submissions be in tar.gz format, you can use zip, bzip, rar or sit but I'm probably just gonna repackage it in tar.gz anyway so just humor me, okay? Now, when we package the theme we want to add the revision number so that other users know whether or not the theme works with the version of Bash Blogger they have installed. So, we're going to use the following format Theme_Name-revision#.tar.gz
Continuing on our mythical example, let's do the following, cd out of our Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up directory (cd ..) and tar -czvf Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up-0.3.4.tar.gz ./Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up
This will create and gzip Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up-0.3.4.tar from the file(s) ./Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up and verbosely report the progress.
Just to check and make sure everything got packed away, do gzip -cd Ultracool_Theme_I_Thought_Up-0.3.4.tar.gz | tar -tvf - and you'll get a listing of everything in the archive.
So, everything look good? Everything packed up properly? Ready to share your theme with the world? Send an email to Bash Blogger Theme Submission and attach your theme or include a link to where I can download the theme. If I deem it good enough, your theme will be made the default for this site and a prominent link to your home page will be featured on the front page.
Good luck and happy themeing.