Long Term Consequences

[Jeffro]

I was thinking about this the other day where WordPress themes are becoming increasingly complex to the point where depending on what you choose to use in the beginning, it could be a nightmare to switch to anything else in the future. With custom fields, custom function.php files, post thumbnails, a certain way in which content is displayed in one theme might look like disaster in a different theme.

For instance, for my Jeffro2pt0.com site, I've always stuck with a content area of 600 pixels wide with a sidebar of 300 pixels. If I were to go to a content area of 580 pixels or less, I know at least some posts in my archive would look terrible.

So my question is, what should someone consider when making a decision on what theme to use?

[Brad]

The most important thing for me is whether or not the style sheet is logically coded and easy to understand.

[Jeffro]

I've been thinking about changing the theme on Jeffro2pt0.com but if I changed it to a more personal theme which cuts down the content area considerably, I'm going to have a lot of posts becoming screwed up because the images are too big. I'm not sure what I can do to avoid that other than not shrinking the content area :(

[greenshady]

There are definitely some consequences. These mainly come in the form of images, especially when they're meant to stretch across the entire post area. This is easy to correct with something like this in your code (themes should already do this anyway):

.post {
    overflow: hidden; /* Hide overly large images in IE6 */
    }
.post img {
    max-width: 600px; /* What's the maximum width an image can be? */
    }

You'd probably want to do the same for captions.

I like to always go big. If you've used a layout with a 400px post area for a year then bump up to 600px, you might have images that look funny because they're too small. But, if you use a 600px layout and go smaller, you can always shrink the images to size.

[Jeffro]

You make some good points Justin with the images. Since I always went big from the beginning, I suppose going small won't be as difficult as I think.

I wonder what some of the other long term consequences of using a theme are other than worrying about the use of images at some point down the road?

[andrea_r]

Page templates is the other thing I can think of. If you've got custom ones, or even any really, the next theme may not have them.

[Jeffro]

That's right since page templates exist as PHP files and not stored in the database.

[itsananderson]

I guess that might be an advantage of using short codes rather than page templates. That way when you change your theme, the plugin and page template will still be intact. The process is a little less user friendly, but a bit more robust (I've actually usually done things with templates, but I might using shortcodes instead).

[vangogh]

About a year ago I not only changed themes, but changed domains, which added having to change urls everywhere since I use absolute urls. My new theme has a wider content area so I ran into the issue with images. Even when they stretched the full width I always centered them so now they my not stretch the full width, but they still look fine.

One thing I changed in my theme was the heading level inside the post. On the old theme I was going with h3s inside the post, but the new theme uses h2s so I had to change those and any heading below in the hierarchy.

I also tend to style plugins/widgets and the styles needed to be update.

With the page templates wouldn't you be fine as long as you created the php files in the new theme. Unless you've really done a lot of customization they should fit right in with the new theme. You could copy the old php. You're going to need new styles anyway. I like the shortcodes idea though. I'll have to play with that.

[andrea_r]

See, here's the thing - on my tech blog (yeah, you know the one) I've stuck to the same theme for ... well, since the beginning. Working on a new one now. (Actually, I was doing a really cool one from scratch but it's taking forever and might be a bit much now) So for that, I really do need to check everythign over a few tiems.

For my personal blog? Oh, it's usually a mess. :D I change themes a LOT on it, just willy-nilly like. But it just sort of goes along with my and my personality.