Changing WordPress Themes
I am changing my wordpress theme for one of my sites (www.phlameworks.com), because the current one (Mambopress 2.2) is giving me some headaches. It has the best layout, the three-column look I’ve always wanted, but I have the following issues with it
- Any plugins that depend on the is_single(), is_home() or is_archive() functions of wordpress are hopelessly broken.
- The fonts are just too small and ugly and painful on the eyes, and the stylesheet is too cluttered up for me to start editing. I am a programmer, not a layout specialist!
- I am bored with it - the colors were just depressing, I was tired of seeing just black-and-gray that I couldnt change.
I guess you can always have everything you want. So I did not see results for all my hardwork in editing themes, despite reading through the WP codex, with its inconsistencies. Imagine them deprecating the wp_list_cats() function in WP 2.1, replacing it with wp_list_categories(), and adding a function paramenter which was not documented! This caused my categoires to show up under a stupid, unlinked parent which identified itself simply as “categories”. I struggled and struggled with the code after i had upgraded, before I found the undocumented argument, list_li. The codex says its a boolean variable, yet the source files say its a string variable. Jeez.
Anyway, I found that my Snap Preview (SPA) plugin doesnt work with the general stucture of the MamboPress Theme, for the same reason why my conditional-display-of-adsense hack has not worked all this while. The tpbc plugin I installed yesterday is still telling me I have 0 visitors in the last hour, WTF! I looked into the code and I found out that the hit count depends on the is_single() function. Boo. So that’s the key. And all this while I have been going crazy trying to fix tpbc, wondering why I had been fooled into installing (what I thought were) useless plugins…
I went to themes.wordpress.net to look for themes again, maybe I would find something good. I didnt have much time to browse around because NEPA might switch off the power and I still had to upload and test themes on a damn slow 64Kbps link. Man, we learn everyday. At first I selected “blue”, “3-column” and some other parameter, I think it was “rounded corners”. I didnt know the theme browser does an OR search by default, so I got hit with some 2-column themes which I mention below. After I noticed the search filter, I modified it to do an AND search, which narrowed down my list to 15 themes. I downloaded five of them.
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