mendax.org

When Asides/Sidenotes stopped working properly at mendax.org a mere two weeks ago, our troubleshooting didn’t turn up any solutions, and we ended up getting diverted and began researching new WordPress themes. Finding such themes has always been an annoyance, firstly because finding a good-looking theme that promotes the atmosphere we want is difficult, and secondly, because finding a theme with the options and support we’d like is doubly difficult.

This latter point bears reflection, because themes can be the scourge of users, and the headache of their respective developers. This is because themes come and go; themes are created, and then abandoned. This is a problem because WordPress is ever-evolving thanks to tremendous work on the part of its developers and users. Unfortunately, this evolution breaks many themes and plugins, and since every WordPress user isn’t a PHP/CSS/HTML master, or simply doesn’t have the time to employ such mastery, we are forced to rely on the developers of the troublesome theme or plugin when problems arise.

So it is that as WordPress users who don’t have the time to develop a unique theme ourselves (which is why we switched to WordPress from our homegrown code in the first place), one of our primary needs as a blogger/administrator is to select software with a future. For the foundation (i.e. WordPress), the future’s pretty clear for some distance, but for individual themes, this isn’t the case. In fact, since moving to WordPress, we’ve slept with at least four themes including the current one, and while each lay has been excellent in its own way, we now feel trapped, and so we keep eying the next pretty girl to cross our sites.

Fortunately, we’ve grown as man-whore, and can say that we’re at least picky about who we get drunk next. Part of us still hopes that Dean Robinson will convince Redoable to, well, do us again, by raising Redoable’s version and and somehow making Asides/Sidenotes work again, since we really started to rely on them for output. Since there’s been little word on this front, however, we’ve begun considering paying for our fun, and adopting a premium theme.

I’ve always been somewhat opposed to the idea of paying for a theme, especially when others can still use it. Of course, less people will use it, and there’s a better guarantee of developer support, but then again, we wonder just how long such support will last in the end.

We began using Redoable just under a year ago, and it’s treated us well for most of that time. A year is about what you’d expect to get out of updates, and it’s a miracle that Robinson intends to do something with the theme down the road, instead of outright abandoning yet. Nonetheless, unless such an update hits soon, and the specific problems we’ve encountered are addressed, then that same year of use marks its the expiration date on our end.

Nonetheless, a year is a long time, and premium theme developers haven’t been too upfront about whether or not their direct support will exist for a theme older than that. In fact, no time frame is ever mentioned as far as I can tell, and though we’re still intrigued about magazine/news-style themes (since it fits the e-zine concept we hoped for back in ‘96), adopting this format for a price, when the theme will ultimately be disposed of a year later, leaves us with much trepidation.

Chances are, mendax.org will make its move to a new theme sometime in February. What theme we’ll adopt, however, is still up in the air. We’ve looked into Revolution, Premium News Theme, and News, and are still undecided. This morning, we heard that iThemes went live, releasing the Essence series of premium themes, but these too, are underwhelming. The problem we see is that many of these themes are based on visual eye-candy like pictures and movies, and don’t lend themselves to a more newspaper-style, primarily-text interface. We don’t want mendax.org to become some flashy site filled with large media files, partially because that was never what we intended to become, and partly because we don’t have the time and talent at the moment to generate that kind of content anyway. Then, we’d like a theme with the potential for ad placement, and by potential, we mean preset placement of ads paces, should we decide to use them. The ad subject is tangental at the moment, but on the back of our minds anyway, and so it’s a topic of consideration for our theme selection process.

In any case, should any of you fine readers have a suggestion, be that for a premium theme or not, we’d love to hear it. What’s clean, customizable, fairly unique, and backed by a developer who isn’t going to shed their relationship with the theme anytime soon? Are we hoping too much?

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