Theme thoughts for version 9
As I scroll back through the various incarnations of my theme (and look at what I liked about interim themes such as “Vista”) I have to conclude that there are design decisions that remain constant:
- Rounded corners
- Purple shaded “brushed metal” texture and white content area
- Right-hand sidebar
- Fixed-width and floating
- Dark grey background
- Content-area fully enclosed, containing posts and sidebar
Version 8 added a few more details:
- Stronger emphasis on pages with “page navigation” at the head of the sidebar
- Stronger emphasis on pages with tabs at top of the template
- “Search” properly integrated into the template
- Categories finally in a decent place
- More emphasis on syndication – allowing for a “podcast” audio blog link in the future
Version 8 was far from perfect though. “Vista” is far more concise – combining navigation, syndication and search into a single menu bar – where version 8 of my own theme separated the tabs into their own space. I like the real-estate gains by combining things.
I am running 4 plugins:
- Akismet
The standard anti-spam plugin. Never be seen without it! - Celtx CSS
I participated in Script Frenzy a while ago. The goal was to write an entire movie screenplay in a month. The formatting of a screenplay is really specific and the free Celtx tool handled everything. I created the Celtx CSS to maintain the formatting of the screenplay when it’s posted to a WordPress blog. - Dimly Archive Table
Three columns, broken down by year and month. It’s a layout I’ve not seen anywhere else, and one I have used for years now. This plugin exposes a standard WordPress widget that plays nice with modern WordPress sidebars. - WP-dTree
I’ve played with about a dozen different page navigation widgets and WP-dTree is by far the best of them. The continued emphasis on pages on my site means that this will need to be a standard feature in themes to come.
The downfall of the current (interim) “Vista” theme is the dual right-hand sidebars. They don’t leave enough space for the blog content. I got rid of dual sidebars in version 3 of the site! Going to a single sidebar will give WP-dTree more space to expand the tree nodes too.
Version 8 didn’t give enough definition of where posts start and stop and while Vista is better, it suffers the same problem. Version 6 (on the other hand) was a little heavy-handed in that regard. What has remained constant is the title and timestamp of posts remains at the top of the post, with version 8′s emphasis on the title being a good design decision. The purple “smudge” doesn’t give enough definition to the top of a post.
I like the idea of conditional sidebars too. There’s no reason to have Archives and categories when you’re reading the various pieces of writing. A single “home” link on the navigation bar is enough to break back to the timed blog entries again.