I was not going to do this until a little later, but in one of those late night self conversations of “I wonder if I can do this quickly” I’ve dropped a new theme on this blog.
This one is a free one in the WordPress bin, Cover which I first saw used by Clint Lalonde. On the last 15 months or so I have put these theme to use on several projects- on the Creative Commons Certification site, for the NetWork Narratives course and for a current project with eCampus Ontario.
There’s a lot to like, the clean full page single post / page view, the giant featured image at the top, the front page slider based on tags, no last century sidebars, the options for “boxed” card views of posts (I think that works well for aggregation sites). It also lacks the Big Clunky Admin screens of a lot of premium themes (all options are set in the WordPress Customizer).
I tried the newer Cover2 theme first and had trouble seeing all the “improvements” — it also lacks the options for the 2-3 card / column layout for the front, one of my favorite features. So I went back to regular Cover.
Since all those projects have involved some custom coding, I feel comfortable “knowing” the theme, and where its limits and opportunities are.
I keep one of those Colo- Colopho– whatever it’s called pages with a blog history, I started in April 2005 with some theme named “Connections”. This lasted over four years, in December 2009 I changed to one called hOpe because f it’s flickr gallery in the header. Jim Groom gave me grief for years. That ran for almost the same length, 5 years, until November 2014, when I changed to a responsive theme (Premium) called Wellite.
I liked the theme, but it was still old school post / sidebar. There was something funky about it that Tom Woodward was not able to grab post content via API, and over the years I had issues that the developers almost always ignored my requests for help.
So now it’s a new coat of paint. I’e got some things to figure with moving widgets to the overlay (or discarding), a few hacked special layout pages. I also have been uber lazy and not used Categories.
But this dog has a new looking house. Any bets on how long it will last?
I like it and the API is all nice and fully functional. Look! It works.
what the heck? Alan went shopping for a new pair of shoes? Lookin sharp, Dood!
love it! now how many of us will you inspire to start shopping around the paint shop also? 😉
Thanks Catherine- inspiration goes around. I noted the clean theme on your blog; inspired me to use it for a friend’s site http://pinefarmersmarket.com
Nice! I was happy to get my site up when I did, but I know I’m driving in the slow lane with that theme. You just reminded me 😉 On my list for end of 2017, a little spruce up. I might get in touch then, Alan… share a virtual coffee and a web design chat? 🙂
Definitely yes.
I like it!