New WP theme is so much work for so little change
For pretty much as long as I’ve had a WordPress blog, I’ve been expanding upon the same initial theme. I’m not quite skilled enough to build one from scratch myself, so I just like to cannibalize existing ones. This has gotten me by pretty well since I like super simple designs and all my previous iterations can pretty much be reduced to header image changes. It has caused one minor problem though.
The theme I was basing all ‘my designs’ on was designed for WordPress 1x releases. While the theme worked fine for the current versions, it didn’t take advantage of some of the new features (like tagging). Well, when WordPress sent around their latest newsletter I decided to do a quick search through the themes that were available. I ended up stumbling upon a nice simple little template that was fairly similar to my own if I just lopped off the entire header. So, since the migration would be super simple, I decided to move my blog to the new theme so I could actually use features like tagging.
This created a whole new problem. Because my theme didn’t really display tags before, I was completely ignoring the feature. Which means now I have to run through every post I’ve ever made and fill in the missing tags. I guess I could just start tagging from here forward, but seeing an empty tag cloud in the blog side bar really bothers the OCD side of me. It’s probably way more work than it’s worth, but I like the new theme.
posted by Christopher Schnese
