Dabbler Migration
Posted on Friday, November 23, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
Filed Under Dabbler
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That recovery could have been automated, but I chose to review the individual postings. While there's some pain in this recovery method, it gave me the opportunity to reread everything, rework a few entries, and check the links on the recovered postings. While I don't regret the effort, I'm pleased to have the little sub-project complete. Now I can make time for more obviously-interesting activities.
WP Themes: Lessons from Gangway
Posted on Monday, October 15, 2007 @ 6:27 pm
Filed Under WordPress
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Within the past week I've called LightCMS "well-crafted" (Sreejith is a code artist), Cutline "workmanlike" (Chris Peterson's a problem solver), and ModernPaper "delightful" (Brian Gardner's unusually disciplined). Although they're very different in detail, all use the same basic CSS vocabulary for describing the document. Since I don't follow the CSS discussions, I don't know what standards someone's trying to enforce, but I've read enough code in my life to have preferences. CSS is a rather spare coding language, but you don't need to look at many stylesheets to learn that there are a variety of coding practices (normally I'd call these "styles," but that would be confusing), and that some of those practices are more readable than others. Gangway's style sheet fails the readability test.
WP Themes: Lessons from ModernPaper
Posted on Saturday, October 13, 2007 @ 9:14 am
Filed Under WordPress
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Behind the scenes, there's a slight surprise; Gardner's used the Home.php page the way most theme designers use Index.php, and Gardner's Index.php is used like most designers use Single.php. (That realization sent me to the Template Hierarchy, where I convinced myself that the design decision makes sense, though it's unconventional.) Opening the files to examine the code is delightful: Gardner writes clean, compact, and obvious code, uses XHTML tags as they're intended, and organizes things well. Needless to say, his CSS files are similarly impressive.
WP Themes: Lessons from Cutline
Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 @ 7:04 pm
Filed Under WordPress
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Cutline is beautiful, but it's not the answer I'm looking for. Your mileage may well vary, because this is a very attractive theme; unfortunately, it runs up against some of my strong preferences.
WP Themes: Lessons from LightCMS
Posted on Monday, October 8, 2007 @ 5:58 pm
Filed Under WordPress
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The big danger with templating languages, whatever the environment, is the temptation to build something really complicated. LightCMS avoids this. The great strength of this theme is its simplicity: There are just a handful of template files, and a simple CSS template controls the screen layout by doing really obvious things in a delightful, well-organized fashion. Understanding this one's simple; it's a good place to begin exploring WordPress, and could well be a useful skeleton for building something more elaborate. I might return to this one when I'm ready to implement my final design.
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