As is obvious to anyone remotely familiar with blogging software, this site is run using the WordPress Content Management System. I’ve used WordPress in one form or another for likely 18 years now, and have on a whole been very happy with it, both the core software and the extensibility it has through themes and plugins.
Of course, as time passes things change, and WordPress has evolved from originally just a blogging software to a fully featured CMS platform for creating, well, virtually any kind of standard web presence. This has its benefits, but also its drawbacks — as time has passed using WordPress for a more straightforward blog has become a bit annoying. All kinds oflittle adjustments here and there to the workflow have added more steps to the content creation process than there really should be for someone just wanting to type up something. To be fair it isn’t terrible, but those few extra clicks and option toggles do add up to time spent on publishing content, and that, I think, has had an effect on me and my desire to write over the past few years.
That’s truly just a minor annoyance though. The Plugin market is too specific to really complain about, but I do find that a great many useful plugins that I find seem to be long abandoned, while everything else feels pretty useless to me and often times is a premium option designed for an online shop anyway — why the hell would I bother with such? It’s all just noise, in a sense — in the early days it wasn’t so bad, but then again everything seems better in the early days in retrospect, when it’s all still new and exciting.
The thing I wanted to focus on, though, are Themes. These are what make a site what it is as an experience — the theme is the look of the site and, as time has passed, themes have gotten to a point of having some reasonable control over the functionality of the WordPress site, making them even more important than they were in the days when they were effectively just cosmetic.
As trends with WordPress have changed, so has the nature of Themes for WordPress based websites. That’s why I bring up the shift in focus so much above, because that change in core usage has changed themes forever.
To put it simply, they all suck now. At least, to me. Now, hear me out. They aren’t bad in a sense that all of them are objectively terrible, as in, they don’t work right, or they are ugly, or whatever. No, they are, as code and design elements, fine. They just aren’t in any way what anyone like me would, or could, ever use.
Everything is made these days for the aforementioned portfolio and shop style websites. While some will market themselves as for blogs, they are few and far between and in actual usage are still just horrible. Weird design trends seem to be put in just because someone can, resulting in something grotesque for a site like mine.
I’l try to describe at least one example of a theme I tried last night. I’ve already forgotten what it was, but the theme was bright. Almost too bright. It looked okay, though, and there were options to adjust things. I looked into a single article and quickly said “nope” when I saw that the featured image was scaled to the full size of the screen on page load and you had to scroll down to even see text.
Yeah, that is maybe something that could have been changed in an option, but I didn’t see one in the preview and I wasn’t going to spend more time than I already had messing with options since while, yes, I could have worked with the theme, I wasn’t super enthused by it.
Little things like this happen time and time again. Some feature is baked in in some weird way, or there is no way to change another feature and everything just looks wrong. Why would you force a 800 by 400 image to be 1:1 aspect ratio, making it look squished? Why would you have a featured image take up the whole screen? Why does a theme need to have fancy animations that, for some systems and browsers, take 10+ seconds to load any readable text?
I feel weird writing about it because it sounds so abstract — everything has a use case, sure, but it’s like everyone making themes has missed the point of usability being guided by a level of practicality. That’s why I liked the Graphene theme, until it began to break on me (seriously, who’s idea was it to save everything for the theme in the main database?) The Pen theme looked amazing, but is the one I mention above with the heavy overhead of animations and the like. Hell, you need an additional plugin to really make the theme useful, which is a mixed bag — yeah, it’s cool when it works, but aren’t we missing the point of getting content and information out there?
That’s why I’ve stuck with the current theme, Frontier, for so long. It’s just nice. It isn’t perfect, far from it, but I do like the customization options and the general feel and style of it. The problem is it isn’t being updated anymore and while it still works mostly okay with WordPress it’s only a matter of time before the damned block theme concept and who knows what else they have cooking behind the scenes breaks it, and I’m shit out of luck. I mean, it’s unlikely to happen in all honesty but it can and eventually I’m sure will.
That’s why I’ve been looking for something more modern in structure yet classic in function — what I would consider a “good” theme for a traditional blog with a few content pages. There used to be a great many which were nice for their time but many of them stopped being updated and / or have been lost to time, and the themes filling in the holes have simply been too much for a site like this.
Now, at this point anyone would be asking “Well, Chris, why don’t you write your own” and that’s a fantastic point. I could do that, just like jwz did for his blog, but the thing is I know fuck all about CSS. I know some HTML. Yeah, I could figure out stuff I’m sure. Hell, I have done a little hacking in that regard at times but writing my own theme the way I want it? That’s above my skill level. Editing an existing theme? Sure, maybe I could do that but I feel like I’d spend all day just breaking things. What I’m getting at is at this stage I just don’t feel up to it, what with all the other things I work on, and the day job.
I just feel like flash (no, not the defunct Adobe software) has really taken over in this market and to-the-point usage cases have fallen by the wayside. Sure, I could change CMS, but that just puts me back in the same boat. I could change to something static like Hugo, but you know how I mentioned plugins being abandoned earlier? Yeah, all the Hugo conversion plugins seem long dead. Go figure. Hell, I could just make everything in plain HTML. Make it look like a green-color terminal. That’s what I did as a teenager on Geocities, but that was over 20 years ago. That’s insane to try to do today, especially with a goal of saving 15+ years of blog content (most of which is trash, sure, but it’s still my trash) so, stuck with WordPress I am.
If I do ever find another good theme, I’ll let you know by, you know, using it, and for once not reverting back to this theme.
More to come, as always.