Hacking WordPress themes for frustration and annoyance.

[reddragdiva]

http://test.factsite.co.uk/ is a test version of the RationalWiki blog, for me to mess around with less boring layouts.

The current theme is approximately what I meant by "magazine-style layout" (at least viewed in a desktop browser): a four-column layout, three of post excerpts and one of sidebar.

This theme is EvoLve, which is almost there but not quite. The front page is nearly right, the single-post pages are laid out right but have not quite right CSS. It's a miserable failure on phones ‐ full-width header, no sidebar, huge space between items (on Android, BlackBerry OS5 browser and Opera Mini). "Responsive" my arse. Oh well.

Suggestions for other themes that are magazine-ish are ''most'' welcomed. (Assume we have a budget of $0 for commercially supported themes.) I'm after that 3+1 columns thing. Must not look like poop on a phone.

Apart from that, the blog is going great guns. The audiophile post got very lightly Reddited — 1150 hits in a day. And I don't even have to administer the server! Yet.

I am now 46! I got a very nice cake. Freda wanted slices from the side with the number 6 on it, because she will be six next birthday. She has been home all week on half-term and has been a right handful; we very much look forward to Monday, when she's back at school, and not at the replacement school on the other side of the borough but at the old main site (while the new main site gets the asbestos stripped out).

Comments

[ideological_cuddle]

It also doesn't scale well in Chrome. Try zooming to 200% and look at the search box.

Seems okay in Firefox though.

Works fine on an iPad, but impressively awful on iPhone. It tries to go single-column (good!) but places the left of that column outside the viewport.

Can't really recommend an alternate theme (my boss dealt with the theme problem by spending money), personally I detest these "magazine" style layouts. But really what you need is something that does your pretties on desktop browsers but switches to a single-column layout on a phone -- magazine layouts on tiny screens are a disaster at the best of times.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, that's what I thought "responsive" would mean - that the CSS would see what width it had and adapt accordingly. (The current boring Twenty Twelve theme does this pretty well.) I have no idea how to achieve this and my CSS-fu is limited to "fiddle, reload, repeat".

Having tried the straight linear blog-style theme and the magazine layout, I definitely want the latter. Trouble is finding one that doesn't suck.

[hairyears]

Happy Birthday!

I seem to be managing fairly well with being 46 years of age...


… Said Hairyears, on a train, returning to London after a weekend of (very) active participation in black belt gradings.

[redcountess]

A belated happy birthday!

I thought you might be interested in this, Sea Org up to its old tricks http://au.news.yahoo.com/nsw/latest/a/-/latest/16240274/church-of-scientology-denies-holding-woman-in-isolation/?cmp=ydn

[reddragdiva]

Thank you!

[reddragdiva]

I think what I'm going to try is making a child theme of Twenty Twelve with stupid CSS tricks in - this saves doing outlandish things. Will probably need to do actual PHP to generate an excerpts-style front page.