Alright, I’ll admit first off that I missed this weeks Shakespeare read. I had a busy round of days off, which involved waking up early and lacking sleep for two days straight. When the time came to sit down and read the next play, I knew I wouldn’t really be able to take it in and stay awake if I tried. I decided simply to put that off until next week when I won’t be quite as busy and tired. Sadly working third shift means that if there’s anything I need to do during the day on my days off, then I have to throw off my sleep schedule in order to be up and do it. Becomes a problem when that happens two days straight.
Anyways, I’ve been taking the time this weekend to do some digging for possible new themes and plugins, and have not been having the best of luck in this process. I set up this blog some time ago, and the current theme and its variants were set up not long after. Unfortunately I’ve found this theme is very recognizable and not very customizable, and there are a lot of other blogs out there using it. On top of that, it’s no longer being actively worked on or supported, and with WordPress 3 coming out soon that might be a problem. So I decided to look around and see if I can find some new alternates that are more up to date. I also have a number of plugins that are also no longer being worked on, so I’m also looking for newer equivalents.
Plug-Ins
Sadly this search hasn’t been yielding very much. There are a lot of new plugins out there, but they’re all pretty much the same thing unfortunately. It seems that every plugin writer in the WordPress community wants to write plugins that do the same thing, and there are very few real options outside of that limited range. For instance, my “I am Reading” plugin that shows what book I’m reading has been broken for awhile now. I’m not the only one that is having the problem based on the forums, but there’s been no real response from the author in quite awhile that gives me any hope that it’s going to be fixed. I was hoping to find a suitable replacement, but apparently there are no other widgets like it out there.
The plugin has actually been broken for some time, at least as far as Amazon was concerned. Luckily it used to allow you to use OpenLibrary.org to get the books information instead, which I wasn’t having a problem with. Unfortunately support for OpenLibrary was removed, but the Amazon side was never fixed so that my problem was resolved. Unfortunately this has left me with a sidebar widget that no longer works, and nothing to replace it with to give me the same functionality. Considering how important book reading is to my blog, this is really something of a pain.
I also have a few other minor plugins that haven’t been updated in at least a year, so I’m confident they are quite dead. They still work fine right now, but a major WordPress update is coming soon, and I fear an update to the sites backbone that major might break these plugins that are no longer worked on. Sadly, like the “I am Reading” plugin, I can’t find any suitable replacements. I honestly have to say that of the thousands and thousands of plugins out there, so very few of them are even remotely valuable. There are hundreds that are all identical, and the rest are so specific in what they do that they’re probably only useful to the author and a handful of others.
Themes
I was also hoping to find a new theme for use on the site as well. First of all, my current theme is in use all over the freaking place. Just in casual browsing since I started using the theme I have probably seen this theme in use on roughly a dozen other sites, and that’s just from stumbling across them while browsing. The way the theme is written I can’t really customize it much more than I have without learning CSS and PHP, so I was hoping to find something else that would suit my fancy.
On top of that though, the theme is also a fixed width theme. This wasn’t a problem when I had my old CRT monitor at 1280×1024, since it fit quite nicely. Now that I have a widescreen monitor that runs at 1920×1080 though, I have to admit the big chunks of waste space on either side of the sites content are not appealing at all. A flexible width theme is designed so that it can stretch and shrink within a large range of horizontal space without having a major impact on the appearance of the site. My current theme can do that below 1280×1024, but unfortunately it can’t expand beyond that, in spite of the fact widescreen monitors are becoming a heck of a lot more common.
Then there’s also that upgrade factor with the new WordPress on the horizon, and the fact this theme hasn’t seen an update from its author in two years. Smaller updates aren’t a big deal, but this will be a change from 2 to 3, and will bring some more significant changes to the software. The likelihood of this update breaking a theme that hasn’t been worked on in 2 years is much higher than one that’s still supported by its author. I don’t want to be stuck with only this one option when that day comes.
Then there’s the variety factor as well. I have a theme switcher on the site, but only have the color variants of the same theme. I’d really like to offer some alternatives that are not just different colors, but also different layouts or appearances altogether. I’m an aesthetically minded person, hence why I have folders with over 100 wallpapers that cycle and change every 30 minutes. Options for aesthetics are always a good thing as far as I’m concerned, and I view my site the same way. There’s also some graphical problems with the color variants that are noticeable if you know where to look which bother me.
So, I took to the theme site to look around and see what was out there. Unfortunately I was dismayed to find that the variety hasn’t really changed all that much, and few authors have yet to embrace themes with a good array of customization and options. Much like the plugins there seems to be an abundance of very similar or extremely specialized themes, and not much in the way of variety or customizable themes.
There’s just an abundance of two column themes that are fixed width, and very few options beyond that. My site uses three columns, and I’ve found that anything less than that simply doesn’t work, or puts too much content on one single sidebar. A lot of themes actually give the user control over how many sidebars are used, but it seems many authors are against giving options, and instead design very specific themes that are basically recolored versions of the software base theme with added graphics. Sadly anything less than 3 columns isn’t going to work, and this eliminates quite a few of the options.
The other problem is that there’s so many themes that are still stuck with old 4:3 resolutions in mind, and the fixed width theme with big chunks of wasted space on both sides is still prevalent in spite of being effectively obsolete for years. Like the plugins, there’s still a lot of authors out there making new work and putting it up for people to use, but most of it is just as useless on the theme side as it is on the plugin side.
The worst part is that when I find a theme that has one thing I want or need, it is missing everything else. The ability to make themes that offer up layout options, column flexibility, a flexible width for the layout, and customizable headers has been around for years. Unfortunately the authors of these themes still aren’t making use of what they can do, and instead most are just content to release reskins of the same plain two-column theme that WordPress had originally. The unfortunate thing about web development is that the front end software a site uses is only as flexible as the layout that is installed on top of it, and sadly with WordPress most of those are still very very limited and plain.
I’m going to keep looking and hopefully I’ll find something decent to use, but I’m not holding my breath. I have the creative talent to make my own layout, but sadly I don’t have the programming and developmental talent to do it, or I’d just concoct my own. I can only hope that the theme designers out there start making full use of what WordPress can do and the flexibility that can be authored.
© 2010, Keonyn. All rights reserved.
