Ikiru Design

A while ago I promised that all of my currently-available themes would be updated to version 1.0 by January 1, 2008. Today is January 1, 2008 and not a single one of them is at 1.0. I did start the process, and make noticeable improvements. Carter’s Line, BWO, and BWO_one are now all at 0.80.

But that still leaves BWO_space and BWO_doodle behind. And it leaves some problems I have with the current 0.80 releases intact. So I can’t declare success on this goal, and I don’t foresee being able to do so today.

I do have a number of excuses to claim for my failure. There’s of course the unexpected holiday chaos (which I should probably expect by now), my recent decision to start a new blog, and the fact that I simply found the updates — a rather tedious and dull activity because the errors across these themes are very similar — too boring to spend much time on.

None of these excuses count for much, and so perhaps the most important point is this: I will have the updates done ASAP, and certainly no later than January 15. The penalty for not making that deadline is death.

A note to myself:

Keeping version numbers (and a changelog) inside the style sheets you make for themes isn’t a bad idea. It really convenient for you and anyone else that uses your themes. But — and this is a big one — you need to actually update it as you make changes to the theme for it to have any value. You haven’t been doing that. Instead your making changes — sometimes very big and important — but leaving the version numbers and change logs out-of-date.

You should resolve that starting on January 1, you’ll always keep this information up-to-date. I know you never really liked New Years Resolutions, but this is a good and coming-soon landmark to use. You can start to keep track now, but you must be keeping track by then.

To make it even more necessary and final, you should make sure all the themes you’ve made so far are at version 1.0 by January 1. It doesn’t matter if it’s flawless and “featureful” but that would be a real bonus as well.

With sincere admiration and modest disappointment,

You

For anyone who wasn’t myself and didn’t read the above note — thanks respecting my privacy by the way ;) — here’ the take away: my themes will be updated and brought to version 1.0 by January 1, 2008. From then on I’ll do my best to keep version numbers and change logs on track. I should have been doing this all along, but it’s better late than never I suppose.

If there’s one big problem with WordPress (and blogs in general) it’s that posts come and go very quickly. This is great for people who are embarrassed by what they’re writing, but for the average person this can be a great disappointment.

It also doesn’t help the case that WordPress’s default Archives page is ugly and hard to use. Nor that most free themes that contain an Archives page aren’t much better.

Since you may be a little confused, dear reader, some visuals. The default WordPress archives page (that’s archives.php for those keeping score at home) is pictured at right (click for bigger).

Anyone who’s ever used it will know that they’re taken from the monthly link to pages that simply show all entries from that month in full form (this time we’re talking about archive.php sportsfans). The format and contents of those pages doesn’t concern us now, as it’s a long-standing — even if unwise — tradition that clicking “February 2007” on the blog of anyone mildly prolific is a dangerous idea.

If you look very hard at improving the Archives page in WordPress, you’ll quickly come to understand why they tend to be so sub-par. WordPress’s native function to create archives (wp_get_archives) is frighteningly limited in it’s abilities. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that nothing it outputs is much better than what we’ve seen.

Since WordPress itself fails, a different application is needed. Having already found Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin — which I used to make my archives at Frozen Toothpaste more presentable — I decided that was a good place to start.

As the Frozen Toothpaste archive shows (see left), the Smart Archive plugin allows you to cleanly display all the your writings from a given month listed chronologically. This, I decided, was the Archives page I wanted my themes to have.

But requiring plugins for a theme to work is fraught with problems. It requires more work than the average WordPress user can or wants to commit to. So however I made my archive, it had to be inside the theme. The easiest way to do that: include the plugin on the page that creates the archives — archives.php.

Though I’m neither a PHP or server-load “pro,” I couldn’t find much of a downside to to putting the code from the plug-in on the page (if you are such a person and can tell me that there is a problem, please do). And, better still, doing so would make the creation of a nice monthly archive as easy as the creation of a default poor one.

So essentially, that’s what I did. I did do a great deal of shrinking and modifying of Mr. Blanton’s plugin, but it meat of it is still intact. Most of my cuts were becuase I required it to do far less than the plugin can. I wanted the code as lean as it could be while still providing the necessary function, which I think it does. To see my archives.php page it in action, just head over to the Ikiru Demo Blog and look at it on any of my themes. (You can also see the Archives page on WordPress’s default theme for comparison.)

And if you’re looking for something even more fancy than the Archives pages provided by Smart Archives (in or outside of) my themes, I’d suggest that the best place to look is Clean Archives which is both flashier and larger than the Smart Archives plug-in. Though these characteristic were detrimental to my need here, they may be exactly what you’re looking for.