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There are literally thousands of WordPress themes out there. Hundreds of people all trying to give you a “limited” free one to entice you into some $49/yr professional support contract for a better version of the same theme. The trouble is the free one generally sucks so you have little incentive to make a purchase. If the free one actually did everything you needed you would have even less incentive to make a purchase.
Here are the main problems I’ve noticed over the past month searching for a theme which meets all of my needs:
- Most themes seem to get developed and tested on an Apple platform which makes them useless on all other platforms. It costs no money to install both Ubuntu and OpenSuSE in a VM and test with every browser in their repos.
- Most themes force a Calendar widget into the sidebar during “Live Preview” and more than half of the time nobody tested that widget with the theme because two or more days of the calendar blow past the right edge of the widget box.
- “Preformatted” or “Code” text blocks wrap rather than providing green/gray bar lines and scroll bars. Few think to provide a vertical scroll bar so the block can remain “visually appealing” in size.
- No configuration setting to switch between full post display and N-word snippet with a “Read More” button.
- Support for zero or only one header image.
Starting with point 1, browsers run differently on different platforms. Testing with Firefox on Apple tells you absolutely nothing about how your theme works with Firefox on Windows, Ubuntu or OpenSuSE. Apple is not a technology company. They are the cult of Steve Jobs with worshipers paying 5-10 times what the products would actually bring in a regular market. Jobs is gone and so is any reason for buying their products.
The Calendar widget bug is completely unforgivable. I could forgive it if the theme creator wasn’t forcing it into a sidebar which was otherwise populated. But to never have tested how it looks is completely unforgivable. These are the same script kiddies who want all of IT to convert to scripted languages so they never have to learn how to properly code and test.
Between yesterday and today I have seen more than a dozen themes which wrap content flagged as “<pre>” or “<code>” or any of the other fixed-width-don’t-mess-with-it-tags. I could forgive “<pre>” not automatically including a greenbar background but not when it is for “<code>”.
The lack of snippet support is horrific. This is the age of Twitter where a vast quantity of the under 30-something crowd has an attention span limited to 140 characters. They can’t remain focused long enough to scroll down a thousand word post and find the next one. By the time they get to the second screen they’ve forgotten why they came. When supporting snippets configuration needs to allow user configurable word count AND post count.
The last point is a serious pet peeve. In this day and age there are only a token few themes which still “look good” without a header image. Locking the site into a single header image is also unforgivable. You need to support up to at least a dozen different header images in a “randomized” fashion. By that I mean each time a user connects to the site they tend to get a different image than last time.
No! Slide show headers are NOT COOL! They are limited data plan bandwidth chewing wastes of electricity.
The situation is almost bad enough to make me endure a useless language like PHP to create my own theme.
