{"id":30020,"date":"2016-05-07T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T20:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=30020"},"modified":"2016-05-07T15:02:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T20:02:00","slug":"thinking-about-the-blog-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=30020","title":{"rendered":"Thinking About the Blog Theme"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to change my WordPress theme.<\/p>\n

For six months, I’ve been using Anders Noren’s Hitchcock<\/a> theme (with some modifications on my part). It’s a great theme and I like it, but it’s been six months, and I feel like refreshing things would be a nice touch since it’s spring.<\/p>\n

Last week, Automattic released the Shoreditch<\/a> theme. I took a look at the demo site, both on my PC and my smartphone. I liked the way it looked on both. I had the thought, “This would make a good foundation.”<\/p>\n

And by “foundation” I mean, “Let’s modify the heck out of this.”<\/p>\n

I ruminated on this a bit on Twitter last night:<\/p>\n

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Planning a WordPress child theme. First thought: "Eliminate the sidebars, make this a single column design."<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Even five years ago, one sidebar was nice, and two was fantastic. Funny how design trends change over time.<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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I remember being excited, over a decade ago, at a WordPress theme design that had four columns. Four! Imagine that. Four.<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Now I think, "That's poor page design, and it's going to display badly on a mobile device."<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The flipside, of course, is that a lot of designs today are so focused on the mobile experience that they look poor on 1920 wide monitors.<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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So much wasted space. No happy medium.<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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You could use the desktop real estate, then hide elements for the mobile view, but that's wasting the user's bandwidth.<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Like I said, no happy medium.<\/p>\n

— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The easy way to accomplish removing the sidebar — I think<\/i> — would be to have sidebar.php in the child theme return, which would mean no sidebar, and then either the content div will fill the space automatically or I may have to write a CSS rule to have the content div fill the space. We’re talking about two lines of code here.<\/p>\n

Then, there are some Jetpack issues. Shoreditch’s social menu depends on Jetpack to function, which seems like an unnecessary dependency to me. (Jetpack is a bundle of services and plugins that rely on the WordPress.com servers to function.) Hitchcock uses a much simpler custom menu and a glyph font; I’d simply port that code over and replace the Jetpack function, eliminating the dependency.<\/p>\n

After that, I’d want to tinker with fonts. And link colors. And the way the tag cloud looks. And a dozen things I haven’t thought of yet.<\/p>\n

I haven’t started working on this. I’m still at the “just thinking” stage. The idea is there, but not the spark.<\/p>\n