Experimentation
My sincere apologies to anyone hitting the blog over this evening. As I noted to a friend this earlier today, while I really do like the black wood theme as an over all look, it has a couple of limitations that I am not extremely happy about. It also tends to make the ad campaign column over on the extreme right of the page (if you saw the site before you know what I am talking about) look like it was at after thought. Further, because of the way it does, without modification to the theme code itself, it is hard to put anything else in that column but an advertising column of the specified narrow width.
My famous side, er, embedded notes: A friend commented to me the other day that it was hard to find the archives from this blog. Well, I have that turned on as of this morning in the old theme. In the new theme that I am experimenting with, there are two lists of the archives by month now showing! Double your pleasure.
So, to that end, I am experimenting with a different theme some this eve. I really like, but it has a couple of limitations also, or so it would appear. Maybe the limitations of both are actually in the way WordPress itself handles a couple of things. For instance, this new one, with its greens and plant images and icons, called Nature Green, does not like the way the images are set up (defined or referenced to CSS style sheet definitions at least in part) by the new mostly easy media insertion tool. So what was previously a nicely aligned image on the right top of the blog text, text flowing around it is now an image at the top left, with the text starting below it. I am generally okay with that, but it means that I have go back and change all the quick entries with clean manual code (which is actually better anyway – as the automatic insertion does not seem to work well with the actually alignment of both the picture and the caption – and it always makes it a link to the picture, which my pictures are generally same size that is showing, so no reason to link to a perhaps larger view) to make them look right.
However, before I do that I have a few other things that I need to get cleaned up on the design or at least make sure that I can work around them. Another example for instance is the widgets show up here and there without having them turned on in that respective sidebar. I prefer to have total control of such things and this at least leads me to believe that a couple of the widgets are hard-coded calls within the style sheet definitions for the theme. Easily removed, once I stop blabbing here and actually go do these steps.
All of this does lead to one basic question though. Why? Why is that I can not just download a them, decompress the appropriate files in the appropriate WordPress directory, enable it and be good to go. No, of course it would not be that easy. First, is the fact that WordPress is occasionally changing how things work, especially notable back in a major version over a year ago was the complete change over to the concept of widgets and how that they are defined and work. I suppose though, that a much more likely culprit in this is that some them designers also do not fully understand just exactly what it is they are supposed to be doing. Again the whole widget idea being a prime example. If it a widget defined that lets me determine if I want to show a link to my internal pages, then let that widget be the tool that does it. Don’t decide that by virtue of your them, I am going to get that internal pages link, and especially do NOT decide that it is going to be at the top left of all my other widgets without giving me a way to order it like I would have it worked as a true widget.
One last gripe. It would be really nice with the themes if WordPress had a bit more of an option for previewing and arranging. Yes, I know that if I have the them installed correctly, I can click on it and it will show me the front page of my current blog using that theme. However, I have the widgets and such set pretty nicely for the Black Wood theme I had been using. Now to get things to look correct with the new Nature Green I have to reconfigure them all. Then if I decide I just can not make the theme work to my satisfaction, I will then have to go back and everything again to what is set to now. Memory not failing me of course, it will not take too terribly long, but it is a pain in the behind end all the same. Would it not make more sense, to have the widget settings be saved with edge theme? Then if I wanted to do a different theme alternately daily, I could easily do that.
Well, enough of the complaining, suppose I should get back to work reading through some CSS theme code and see what I can do to straighten out these issues manually before to many people get over here and see this mess.
WOW! The cleanup of embedded menu items that should have been handled as widget inserts did not take to long to remove and get straight. I think I am liking this new green colors scheme with a little bit of black. Now the task of cleaning up all those 70-80 photo sections of code. Not bad when doing one two, but this many is a pain.
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