Revised Theme
First pass of the new theme that is using Weaver based on the Twenty-Ten theme was turned on early Monday and after a bit of tweaking is ready to mention it. The Weaver theme platform allows for a good deal of customizing, though not quite as much as the theme Atahualpa that I had been using most recently, but still a good amount of flexibility to achieve the look that is desired. Because it based on the Twenty-Ten theme and is written for the newer versions of WordPress, it does have several advantages and I think that the sometimes encountered slow load on the site was because of the funky way Atahualpa stored/retrieved settings – time will tell on that particular aspect of things.
Aside from the possible big speed that I am still deciding about and that only occurred on occasion, the other big advantage is the usage of the sub-theme process in Weaver (that really came about in WordPress 3.0). This allows me to make my customization to the theme as a sub-theme of the original, which is pretty much how Weaver does it.
It does not sound like such a big deal until you get an update that comes along. I made the mistake of one set of updates on Atahualpa across all my blogs, thinking I had nothing to be concerned about because I had backups of the profiles. What a mistake that was. First, only part of the theme settings are backed up. It also wrote over top of and even deleted my custom images for various things. By using the sub-theme process to handle the different customizations, when an update happens it does not change those settings I have spent time figuring out and setting on my installation.
Another point of failure for the previous Atahualpa was the need meddle with the favicon files. That is the little images that show up on the corning the browsing tab and gives a sense of what you are looking at or at least lets me keep straight which blog I am working on for my on sense of sanity and maybe gives users a sense of branding. I am not sure why they felt they had to load those into their system and back-end them out, since they work so extremely well just based on formating and naming correctly in the right location on the server directory. After doing the Atahualpa install you have to go through the method presented or you get a generic favicon. However, even then about half the time my icons would be lost upon presentation. No problem with Weaver, as wisely they leave you and favicons to run as has been intended for sometime and working just fine.
One thing I did like about Atahualpa that Weaver did not have available direction was the rotating image for the header. I think there was some direct code to make some plugin work, but it was way more than I really needed. I did find a plugin called WP Rotating Header (I think that is right, search if not) that is simple and works like a charm. You put images you want in rotation in a folder off of your root and pretty much your done. I would make sure you have sized correctly ahead of time, just to be sure you don’t get any odd resizing stuff happening.
Granted, there are a few things I still need to do. Here are the ones I can think of quickly that I will be addressing very soon:
- Correcting some of the header images to make the blog title and tag line more readable
- Adding the second custom menu, beneath the header image that will likely have the main categories as menu items as before (I am still working figuring the drop down menus for the sub menu items)
- A little bit more clean up on the sponsor links to get the vertical alignment to work a bit better
- Some work on the network area, not sure what to do there in particular, but something.
- Still like an option from some point in the past that switched from recent post, categories, etc with a tab in the widget area on the right. Would like to switch with those two and my tweets.
