Despite the high levels of creativity and diversity amongst WordPress themes there are always going to be parts of the theme that are similar. WordPress provides the template tags to get this information out, but it should it also provide a framework for presenting this information?
I’m not suggesting that WordPress should come bundled with blueprint, perish the thought, or that themeing should become a sandbox excercise; however, I do wonder if there are some tasks that can be accomplished centrally to make it easier for anyone producing a theme.
It would be a simple matter to develop a base library that can be included using a theme tag or, even better, to have some background processing that would output a stylesheet to your basic specifications.
Imagine:
<?php wp_stylesheet( 'grid' , "columns=8&width=125&gutter=10" ); ?>
<?php wp_stylesheet( 'typography' , "family=helvetica&size=12&baseline=18" ); ?>
Obviously something like the example would make a lot of assumptions and you may need to override them in the theme stylesheet proper, but to have that option might help to set new standards for theme production, as well as making it quicker and easier to do.
So what do you think? Should WordPress have its own CSS theme framework?
I updated my Fun with Categories plugin this morning. The update is a relatively minor bug fix, but as many of you weren’t subscribing when I created, and last updated, this plugin I thought I would add a quick introduction to it.
Fun with Categories is the first real plugin I ever wrote for WordPress. I wrote it for a specific website and have since released it for everyone. So what does it do?
Fun with categories adds the ability to link to posts that are in both of the two selected categories.
Example
Imagine you have a WordPress theme gallery. You have categories that are based on colours, and categories that are based on the number of sidebars you have.
This plugin lets your users ask for themes that are orange and have two sidebars.
I am also considering increasing the number of possible categories to three, or maybe even four.
WordPress weekly is a great weekly podcast, about WordPress, by Jeffro.
Last week’s episode was an open mic episode where we discussed topics like Woopra, and WordPress brand restrictions and it was pretty interesting.
Notable about the last show was the announcement that Matt Mullenweg will be appearing on the next show on the 23rd.
This one will be unmissable!
I have started a very significant redesign of this site and it occured to me that my home page isn’t very useful. I am considering doing away with it.
The move away from standard blog templates, where the home page contains the last three to five posts, to a more magazine / news style means that often the home page doesn’t contain anything the visitor actually wants.
My current home page features an excerpt from the latest article, a category list, and a tabbed area to promote my tools, plugins and theme(s). So anyone who lands on my home page, and a lot of my visitors do, has to decide what they want to see, and click through, before they get any actual content.
On other blogs, blogs that are really just about articles and little else, I have a post on the home page; however, the SEO chappies are regularly telling us that duplicate content is a bad thing and from a visitor perspective it is better to have one article in one place so, at the very least, they don’t have to go one click further to add comments.
So, what I am considering is doing away with the home page altogether.
Obviously I still want people to use my nice easy base url, but I want to give them content straight away so my current solution is to style every single post page as a potential landing page, and use a 302 redirect from the home page to the most recent post.
If the user has arrived looking for something specific then they may read the article first, and they can still get to where they want. If they have arrived without knowing what they have in mind then they have content available instantly. No extra clicks.
So What do you think, good idea?
Do you think any other blogs suffer from the same problem, or if it just me? Can we do away with the home page altogether?