“We’re probably going to add 100 themes over the next year”
which is not something i expected to hear. I really liked the idea of “one theme to rule them all“. it seems like quite a waste to write all that PHP that’s only functionally a shade different than some other theme. I mean really, what are the structural, PHP differences between themes?
- post meta before or after post content
- excerpts on front pages/archive pages
- sidebar asides
other than that, pretty much everything on the wishlist can be handled with CSS or javascript. That is, aside from any “top posts” or other special widgets. Modularity demands that appearance code (themes) be seperate from plugins (added functionality).
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22 Sep 2006 at 7:51
Scott
I suppose Barthelme has been forgotten. Sigh.
Another suppose: WordPress.com probably needs to be as out-of-the-box-blogging-fun as possible to keep it viable. But the fact that the Sandbox is there and able is a good thing. A very good thing.
But what I’d like to pick up from your suggestion is scripting. It’s a security issue, of course, but perhaps that could be controlled by enabling it through plugin-like functionality. Not sure exactly.
I think the next step is to make the blogs function better. And for that, scripting is probably the key.
22 Sep 2006 at 8:30
adam
well, possibly forgotten by matt, but probably not by the dozen people who requested it in the thread.
my point with scripting was that much of the “cool factor” that people want from themes is done through scripting, not through any sort of core theme structure. aside from options pages (which are largely rendered moot by the combination of widgets and CSS control), there isn’t much that the PHP structure of a theme can change.
24 Sep 2006 at 8:04
psa & some more design wank « wordpress™ wank
[...] Adam wonders whether another 100 wordpress.com themes are really necessary. My feeling is that custom CSS didn’t take off as they’d hoped, and Matt is reading this as ‘people want full-scale themes, not mere stylesheets’ rather than ‘$15 is too pricey and people are put off by the lack of official support’. No doubt the unpopularity of custom CSS will get spun as ‘oh, it was always going to be a niche option for geeks, we weren’t expecting much’; but there were copy-and-paste options for non-coders within a couple of days of the feature being launched, so that doesn’t really wash. I’m also afraid that the whole Barthleme mess may have damaged Sandbox’s chances of getting made the default theme (this would get spun as ‘we put it on wordpress.com and it wasn’t that popular’). I hope I am wrong about this, but then I remember how political the Kubrick decision was, and I wonder. [...]
19 Nov 2006 at 2:08
The Thin Line: From Skin To Theme « sunburntkamel
[...] My point in writing all of this is to show that the idea of writing a new theme every time is overkill. Template files themselves don’t vary a lot. Most of the functionality and variation happens in javascript and CSS. those can both be handled by only a couple of files. If theme authors could depend on the sandbox being in every wordpress distribution, It would make it easier for them, as well as for casual users who just want to change something small about a theme. It’s a lot easier to find the thing to change when there are only 3 files in the Theme Editor panel of the dashboard. [...]