Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to change my WordPress theme.
For six months, I’ve been using Anders Noren’s Hitchcock 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.
Last week, Automattic released the Shoreditch 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.”
And by “foundation” I mean, “Let’s modify the heck out of this.”
I ruminated on this a bit on Twitter last night:
Planning a WordPress child theme. First thought: "Eliminate the sidebars, make this a single column design."
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
Even five years ago, one sidebar was nice, and two was fantastic. Funny how design trends change over time.
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
I remember being excited, over a decade ago, at a WordPress theme design that had four columns. Four! Imagine that. Four.
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
Now I think, "That's poor page design, and it's going to display badly on a mobile device."
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
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.
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
So much wasted space. No happy medium.
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
You could use the desktop real estate, then hide elements for the mobile view, but that's wasting the user's bandwidth.
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
Like I said, no happy medium.
— Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) May 6, 2016
The easy way to accomplish removing the sidebar — I think — 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.
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.
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.
I haven’t started working on this. I’m still at the “just thinking” stage. The idea is there, but not the spark.