Giving WordPress That New Car Smell (Part 2)

In Part One I talked around what I did. Here are the themes I picked, what I feel about them, and what I loved and hated.

All three themes are frameworks, and I’m using children there of. Unlike just making a child theme from TwentyEleven, these are true, robust, themes, designed by artists. This took me maybe 10 hours of work, total, to do everything on all three sites, and as most of that wasn’t me sitting down and concentrating, but multitasking and bouncing around, so it may have been 4 hours serious work.

Oh and all these themes are ‘premium.’ And worth it.

Origin – In use on Half-Elf On Tech

Origin was the first theme I picked, from DevPress, and I decided on it after playing with a bunch of different DevPress themes. I’m partial to them (and ThemeHybrid) because I’ve been using Hybrid Core since before it was released, and I know it. I’ve memorized the hooks, and I like being able to quickly spin up my functions.php for it. All the serious changes are done in a pretty small file, actually, and mostly have to do with inserting FaceBook and Google into the header and footer, my comments ‘rules’ and that cool clickable (and hoverable) asterisks in my site description. I also really like the ‘full page’ view, and used it on some of my content-only-no-comments pages like Licensing.

Since I have a mini rant later on about favicons, Origin lets you update the favicon right there in the theme settings.

This is especially important for Multisite installs, where each site will want their own favicon. Now I don’t need a plugin. And if anyone can think of a cooler favicon for this site than the Spock Eye, let me know.

Balance – In use on Ipstenu.org

Balance, from StudioPress, was next. This was a huge departure for me, and oddly it’s the theme I love the most and have the most issues with. Let me explain.

While I’m perfectly comfortable bashing away at a functions.php file, unlike Origin, Balance is a child theme. See, HybridCore is a ‘starter’ parent theme, where you make your own child off it. Balance is a true child theme. When I got it, it came with a copy of Genesis, which is the parent. So while with Origin I made ‘HalfElf Origin’, I couldn’t do that here. I would have to edit the Balance theme directly, which goes against my nature.

Back in the day when I used Hybrid News, Justin made a massive upgrade. I hated it, as I’d made all sorts of tweaks to the theme, and it was a bitch to fix. Now, I happened to agree 100% with the choice to make those changes, you had to upgrade the menus for WordPress 3.0, but it was painful. This sort of hassle scarred me for life. I don’t like to edit themes directly. So I pinged Andrea and asked her ‘How often do these themes update? She said ‘rarely’ which isn’t the same as ‘never’ and, while calming, wasn’t the best thing in the world for my neuroses.(Nacin makes ‘tin foil hat’ jokes about me for a reason. I don’t trust anything.) Personally I’d love to see Genesis go the same way that Hybrid did, and to make a ‘core’ that is included in all their themes. Then Balance would include all the files for Genesis and Balance, and people could happily make their own children.

With that in mind, I did a smart thing. Instead of editing the child theme, I made two files: ipstenu.css and ipstenu.php (I told you I’d get back to why there was no style.css(Actually, there is a style.css in the folder, but only to stop WordPress from throwing silly errors. It does nothing.)) and put them in a fake theme folder called ipstenubalance. Those I included into the style.css and functions.php of the actual child theme.

Calling the CSS was easy:

@import url("../ipstenubalance/ipstenu.css");

And the special functions is just this:

require_once( get_theme_root() . '/ipstenubalance/ipstenu.php' );

Now all I have to remember is that if the default style or functions gets edited in Balance, to re-add those calls in.

The reason I dislike Balance, however, is not my own personal issues (and I’m well aware they’re just mine). It’s that there was a favicon forced on me. I hate that with a passion. You see, everything else is really a small change. I want a larger font, a darker blue, a bigger curve. But a favicon is … your site is naked without it. And it should resemble who you are. That’s why I have my ‘me’ image as my favicon most of the time.

But at the same time I love Balance, because I was able to overwrite the favicon with this:

remove_action( 'genesis_meta', 'genesis_load_favicon' );
add_action( 'genesis_meta', 'ipstenu_load_favicon' );
function ipstenu_load_favicon() {
	echo '<link rel="shortcut icon" href="https://ipstenu.org/favicon.ico" />';
}

Other than that, Balance is my first go-at with a ‘managed’ theme, and I have to say I’m really astounded. If you didn’t know anything about functions and hooks, you could still make this site (in fact, I did, via a Genesis Hooks plugin). It’s crazy customizable, without feeling clunky. And yes, some of the other ‘pro’ themes I looked at felt that way. StudioPress impressed the hell out of me. If you need a ready-to-go theme and don’t want to mess around with code, StudioPress is the way to go. They set the bar for parent themes. And like Origin, they too have a full-screen template, which I used on my terms of use. I suppose this is why the don’t go the route of Hybrid Core. Most of their users aren’t going to play with child themes, and instead will use the built in features, or the Genesis Plugins to customize things from the WordPress admin dashboard.(This morning it occurred to me that having ‘hybrid core’ as a non-parent theme means that if Hybrid updated, Origin would need to be, and now someone has to edit that. The difference is I’m only editing my child theme. When Origin gets updated, it doesn’t impact my child, and a trained theme guru will make the edits, not a newb. On the other hand, if Balance is updated… Yeah. I suspect at this point it’s too much work to say ‘Make a child theme!’ for the Genesis users, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation!)

It’s a step ‘back,’ in terms of me being a developer, but at the same time I feel a burden lifted when it comes to managing things. A strange balance.(The pun was totally intended.)

Dotos- In use on Ipstenu.Photos

The last one was for my Photo site, Ipstenu.Photos, and I wanted it to look like a photoblog. This was really easy, since as Dotos is also from DevPress, I could cheat and make a child theme called photodotos and copy my Origin functions over, renaming halfelf for photos. I did one minor css tweak on Dotos, and that was to hide the ability to comment on photos. Didn’t want it or need it. I have a lot less to say about it, since everything I said in Origin applies here, and I did less tweaking.

So there you have it. My sites got a facelift, and I’m so happy, I load them up just to smile at how sexy they look. My site feels bright and new, and I want to blog more. And that is a win, no matter how you look at it.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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