Thoughts on Themes

There are a lot of great WordPress themes out there. Depending on the look and feel you’re going for on your blog, and the number of customizations you need, it’s a good chance that one quick look at The WordPress Theme Viewer, or WordPress Themes That Don’t Suck will get you something drastically close to what you need in the way of a site theme. But once you find that theme, you may be in for some nasty surprises.

Just because a theme looks great at first doesn’t mean you won’t find reasons to groan once you get into making it your theme. Take the theme I’m using here. It looks good, it loads quickly and it’s CSS based. All good things. But then we get into the few details that I’ve just spent hours reworking.

• A good portion of the theme navigation was hard coded in German. This could have been simplified greatly if the theme had used a language include file (Localization, it’s a good thing!) Then I would simply have had to change the text in a single file to adjust to the fact that my language and time formats are different from the designers.
• There are a few basic, but in my opinion, absolutely necessary, features missing. For one, there’s no option to edit a post or comment directly when logged in as admin. This means if I catch a typo, I’m stuck going back to the admin menu, moving to the manage posts tab, and then hunting for the post I’ve made the error in. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s tedious at best, so I’m looking at another hour or so going through and making sure all the “little bits” are in place.

There are always other little things you find you’d like to adjust, but that’s part and parcel of any site design, and I doubt it will ever change, whether the template is custom or from a third party.

If possible, check to see what version of WordPress the theme you’re looking at was designed for. You may be shocked to find that older themes call functions is WordPress that simply don’t exist anymore, and will be quite broken when you go to use them. It’s for that very reason that I generally suggest simply installing another copy of WordPress in a subdirectory (or sub folder, whatever you wish to call it) just to make sure that a new theme won’t completely break my WordPress install.

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the Spun Puppy | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice