If Your Theme Breaks My Site, I’ll Never Use It
December 11, 2007
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The other night I was doing some preliminary investigation of new themes for the site. I’m not really planning on rolling it out until about February 1st, but I wanted to see what sort of designs have come along lately that might look like they’d work for me.
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This is not good.
I don’t run any sort of weird plugins, or widgets here on BloggingNotes. Everything is pretty much stock. But two of the themes that I downloaded essentially made the site inaccessible. I have a very hard time believing that I’m the only blogger who’s had this issue, and yet these themes haven’t been fixed.
Which means, like the title implies, any show-stopper errors that happen to my site after I activate your theme means that I’ll simply go back, delete and move on, never to try the theme again. While this might sound a little ruthless, all I can do is point to the eight other themes that I downloaded that DIDN’T break the site. If I’m using common plug-ins and widgets, I should never get errors that make the site inaccessible. Never.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I very much appreciate the work that theme designers put into their creations. I’ve looked into developing a theme myself and I don’t think that I have the patience to get all the way through it. That may change at some point in the future, but for the moment, that’s the way it is. Or maybe I’ll look at getting one custom designed for me.
But all themes should work with common plug-ins and widgets without breaking the site. That’s just the way it is.
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December 11th, 2007 at 9:06 am
I’ve found that most themes need a bit of tweaking to fit what you’re trying to do.
Some themes don’t work well with certain plugins. This is particularly true when it comes to magazine/newspaper style themes that do things a bit differently from your average WordPress theme.
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December 11th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Frank, this is true. Some do need a little tweaking, and that I don’t mind. But if 8 out of 10 themes work fine, and two make it blow up completely, that’s a little more than a bit of tweaking.
And now that you mention it, one of the themes may have been a “magazine” style theme. I’ll have to look into that.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:14 am
I like to do a little personal tweaking when I select a theme, but too much tweaking makes me throw the theme away. If I’m doing that much tweaking I might as well code my own theme.
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December 12th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Lizzie - I don’t mind doing a little tweaking, just to personalize things a bit, but, you’re right - if too much work is involved, it’s easier just to move on to something else.
I wish I had the patience to do my own theme, but I’m realistic enough to know that I’m not.
Thanks for your comments.