They have been a challenging few weeks. They? It has? With so many punctuation disasters in open play here in the English language, I fear not for this miniscule error or judgement fail on my part.
I’ve been developing a client’s site. In Wordpress. This is my very first commercial project on the platform. And it’s quite the revelation.
I’m from the old school of HTML/DHTML/XHTML/CSS. Dark arts but lovely in context when you get your head around their vaguaries. Having said all that I’m no coding ninja, not by a long way. And now I’m back in the family after some time off from the tags, I’m already bemused by the apparent loveliness of CSS 3 and the new flavour of HTML.
The site is a news one. Or at least that’s part of it.
Since Wordpress and I have been friends a fair while, I decided to look up a theme, find strains of wonderfulness within and customise it to become a magical SEO-wielding temptress for all to savour and indulge upon.
That was my initial plan.
Having spent an ungodly amount of time hunting down the ideal jumping off point; being bewitched at first by the range available, challenged by the realisation that there’s nothing truly startling out there, and finally bemused at the apparent waste of time (although I like to think of it as constructive learning) I have come to the following conclusions:
- Premium themes, no matter how great, are ok only if you are prepared to settle for something expected, rather than groundbreaking. They’re either too flashy or too simple. I need something effective, with a fast foundation and no bloaty nonsense that doesn’t need to be there. Do people really buy premium themes with ITALICS on header texty images? Really?
The only exception to this rule, for me, is Mimbo Pro - despite it being roughly as old as Noah (more on him later), gets my vote right now since it ticks the most boxes. But I’ve seen some frankly atrocious customisations of its layout which made me reconsider my options about 175 times.
And I did consider some of the options from Solostream including the latest, WP-Sublime (props for packing in a superb range of subscription Calls To Action across the sites you develop, Mike), but the collection just didn’t give me the scope I need as a layman in the art to end up with a result that would satisfy both the perfectionist Virgo in me, and the client - In-house support for premium themes is sometimes, but not always, a step-up from those offered by freemium theme designers.
- Frameworks appear to be the way forward for a truly innovate Wordpress solution. I absolutely love the look of Hybrid by Justin Tadlock.
I also love the feel of Thesis but for a man with my limited abilities and an apparent allergy to ‘action hooks‘ (awesome guide and hacks how-to on the subject, if you’re feeling bold), it feels like it would always look the same as 75,000 other sites. You really have to be a true PHP god if you’re going to actually come out the other end with something that matches your needs. - Plugins are inherently evil. Sometimes they break your Wordpress install, sometimes they make it chug to the point where only the toilet-bound would be willing to spend time with your elephant in the corner.
- You can get round the problems of 4 by building your own custom functions, adding funky code to hooks, etc. But it takes some serious PHP knowledge to do it.
- There are an indecent amount of websites devoted to Wordpress that are superb in offering designers/developers of all levels the chance to expand their minds.
But they never seem to have the answers you’re looking for and when you ask, the answers aren’t what you wanted.
And there are some frankly amazing tutorials that can help you really get to grips with the platform. If you have time, and don’t need to earn money. Yeah, I totally get the ‘learn and earn’ concept. But it doesn’t wash at 2.30am. - There is no premium theme that offers (all of the following) a subscribe by email/RSS widget; flexible advertising logo options in the header; a related posts/’subscribe to my RSS feed’ in the footer of each post; a space-economical, horizontally-based listing of new-ish postings on the home page featuring sub-headings (highlights) you can link from to secondary news stories; a ‘list of authors and their latest posts’ page template; an ‘archive starting with the latest 20 posts’ page template.
- In stark contrast to my balls-out statement in 4., Widget Logic looks like an absolute must-have and the best plugin ever.
But some other plugin developers are starting to charge for the best ones.
And everyone’s getting a bit too heated about what GPL really means and whether you can justify making money from a platform that is essentially free.
But people have been doing that since the Ark. Which was in itself a money-making exercise since Noah had a side business going on selling rhino burgers to the terminally wet. - Your eyes hurt at 4am in the morning after a frenzied coding session.
This is founded in fact and experience. I would much rather be sampling the world’s entire range of bourbon than staring at a screen. Or playing with a funny cat. - All said and done, Wordpress is like the cute but bearded woman; you know you shouldn’t love her, but she captivates you with her irrepressible wit and lovely smile. And leaves you with a nasty case of stubble burn.