What's the HARDEST theme stuff to do in WordPress?

[alicam]

Folks,

I am shortly to release my first public beta of Vanilla, my stupidly-long-awaited WordPress theme.

I believe it can do pretty much anything, theming-wise. I dunno if that's a ludicrous boast and I'm not saying any other theme is terribly limited by comparison, but here's a serious question:

What would you like to see me demonstrate in Vanilla that you've found REALLY hard to do in WordPress? Or what have you found is possible but just plain DIFFICULT to do?

I'm talking about theming stuff here.

Let me give you an example:

In WordPress we have to contend with that bothersome thing called "the loop". So there are things that can only happen when you're in the loop, and if you want those same things going on outside of the loop you're in for some extra code and bother.

In one situation, I wanted to give my client an "Edit Page" button in a top admin menu. Now, the admin menu is rendered at the top of the page and is included in the get_header() function call, but the edit page button is created as part of what goes on in the loop, when $page is populated, etc.

In Vanilla, with absolutely nothing extra to do at all, I was able to get the edit button to be included in the top admin menu. No extra code, no nothing.

As far as I can tell, there is a lot of extra screwing around in WP if you wanna do that with the traditional WordPress approach to theming... you've gotta use WP_Query or whatever outside of the loop, etc.

Don't shoot me down for that example, coz that's all it is... an example, and perhaps not a great one.

So what else have you found is hard to do in WordPress theming. I'd like to a) know what people struggle with and b) take those concerns and example to Vanilla to see what I can achieve :)

Aside from Vanilla, I hope all theme developers listen to the issues raised here, with a view to highlighting any improvements that could find their way back into the WP core to improve "our lot"!

One great thing that is about to arrive in WP 2.8 is the at-long-last inclusion of the Sandbox dynamic classes in the "core"... gee, that only took 2 years :)

Cheers all,

-Alister

[Ryan]

Making things easier is always a good idea. Does it slow page loads much?

From what you have posted above, I would have thought that a plugin was a more likely tool to use for that rather than a theme. Or perhaps I have misunderstood exactly what your theme does.

Looking forward to the beta release :)

Off-topic: Are you coming to WordCamp NZ?

[Ryan]

The main thing I've found difficult to work with in WordPress is the commenting area. The code in there seems to get very convoluted and I often struggle to figure out what is going on.


I've downloaded your latest alpha ... http://code.google.com/p/vanilla-theme/downloads/list

I'd love for you to explain the purpose of it as I'm totally baffled. It looks like a lot like the code gobbledy goop that is in Carrington. I don't see how these themes make things easier, to my eye they look the most complicated, difficult themes to work with. Or am I missing something major here?

I'm guessing you guys are trying to do something here which I don't understand at all. I've asked quite a few people what the purpose of this method of developing themes is, but no one has been able to tell me and I am EXTREMELY keen to hear what is directly from you. I spent quite a bit of time plowing through the Carrington themes code and I couldn't figure out why it has been developed the way it is. I also did lots of Google searching trying to find an answer, but the only information I could find gave the same generic explanations, like "theme revolution" or "will make themes so much easier to create" etc. etc. without actually explaining anything about how they work or how they intend to improve WP theming.

I am truly baffled and hoping you can enlighten me :)




BTW, the HTML in your alpha release was really confusing, some the tags seem to have carriage returns in the middle of them! When I first saw it, I thought something was wrong with it and that chunks of each tag were missing. So I tried it in another browser and saw exactly the same problem. Is this intentional? I find it near on impossible to see what is going on with the code like that.

You also have the following code in your header. Will this be in the final release? I hate seeing ugly hacks like that in themes and generally don't touch anything that uses them.

<!--[if lt IE 8]><link
rel="stylesheet" href="http://localhost/wordpress28/wp-content/themes/vanilla/blog-set/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8" /> <![endif]-->

[alicam]

I've downloaded your latest alpha ... http://code.google.com/p/vanilla-theme/downloads/list

I'd love for you to explain the purpose of it as I'm totally baffled. It looks like a lot like the code gobbledy goop that is in Carrington. I don't see how these themes make things easier, to my eye they look the most complicated, difficult themes to work with. Or am I missing something major here?

Ryan, you're highlighting the fact that I really struggled with getting Vanilla out when I did, last year...

It was a proof-of-concept, a conversation starter, etc.

Vanilla has changed quite dramatically since then, in the direction of getting a lot simpler.

But please understand this... and I'm speaking not as an Alex King fanboy, but as someone who's put a lot of time in to his theme: Carrington is frigging awesome.

I totally get that a lot of people do not "get" it, but I would suggest that's because it's just a damn hard thing to explain, altho (trust me), when you do get it, you can see just how stunningly powerful it is.

What I am doing with Vanilla is trying very hard to preserve the stunning power of Carrington, but along with an (attempted) simplification of what it's doing.

That said, What Alex King has done with Carrington is really already very well done... very refined.

My personal opinion is that Carrington is best *demonstrated*, and I intend to *show* people Vanilla, both by means of video and webinar formats.

I am really really disappointed for King's sake that Carrington is so frequently derided. I have to assume those doing so don't get it. Because if they get it, and continue to "bag" it, then they're just plain not serious about theming.

I am more than pleased to organize a demonstration of Carrington (not Vanilla) for those who want to see what it can do. It will then also help those people to see where I hope Vanilla takes it even a step further :)

Takers?

-Alister

[alicam]

Sorry... to complete what I was saying...

I will have my new version of Vanilla out as soon as I can and I hope it both honours Carrington (and Thematic and Hybrid) from which I borrow things, but also shows off some other cool things, including some stuff with CSS that should blow people away... again, not my genius, but some very very cool code I've integrated into Vanilla that I'm amazed hasn't been done before.

Again, I'll do videos and webinars on that as soon as I can get it clean enough :)

I'm flat out on client work and I'm very tight on time but I am busting my chops to get it done!

Thanks for your patience and thanks for not judging Vanilla by what's in the current alpha :)

-Alister

[Ryan]

Where would this demonstration be? Online?
I'll be in Melbourne briefly in November, but it would be nice to understand how it works before then :p

I'm definitely keen to see some sort of explanation. I just can't see how if something is so great that no one can explain even the mere basics of what it's purpose is. I'm trying not to criticise too much, but it's hard not to when something seems so utterly pointless.

I am definitely one of those who 'doesn't get it'

[alicam]

Incidentally, Anthony Cole has asked me to speak at WordCamp NZ, but I can't commit right now for personal reasons... but I'll try and get there if I possibly can.

The demo will be via webinar (Adobe Connect Pro) and it can be as soon as works for others.

Now you need to get to bed, don't you?! Hee hee

-A

[Ryan]

Here's some text from http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/. I can't see anything in there which makes the theme seem any better than any other theme out there. I think illustrates quite well why people seem to bag it a lot.

Flexible and powerful Carrington template system
...
Theme abstraction and organization like none other

I guess some people may like this. But since WP themes are so easy to understand it seems like it is more likely to confuse people and make things harder to do.

Rich, semantic markup (with Sandbox CSS classname support)
Tasty styling and typography
Page and category navigation menus

That's just general theme stying/markup stuff. Nothing special there.

AJAX loading of posts in archive lists (optional)
AJAX loading of comments (optional)

Some might find that useful I suppose. I'd prefer to have that sort of thing in a plugin rather than built into a framework though.

There is extra processing associated with the file system and context checks that Carrington requires. Because of this, use of a caching plugin is recommended.

IMO it's not a good sign when your theme sucks up so much resources that you have to recommend a caching plugin! What if you want to add something dynamic to your site and so can't run a caching plugin?

[Ryan]

Now you need to get to bed, don't you?! Hee hee

Yep! 12:07am right now.

[alicam]

Gimme 5 minutes and I'll get a reply to you on Video. I can't type fast enough for my thoughts.

-A