in which i am reminded for the four zillionth time that these people have no time for designers

March 30, 2006 at 6:41 pm · Filed under design, Pontification, wank

Finally, all those elitists who kept saying you had to be comfortable with PHP to develop a theme are telling the truth:

This document assumes basic PHP editing skills, though you probably won’t have to write and code of your own.

You probably won’t? Ah well, at least now the coders can claim they were right all along; that templates are software and shouldn’t be touched unless random question marks and semicolons hold no fear for you.

Oh, I have basic PHP editing skills, don’t worry about that, so the instructions are borderline comprehensible. I’m just sick of the goalposts getting moved all the time. For 1.2, it was all about total control through CSS and don’t touch the default template. For 1.5, designers suddenly had to deal with a dozen files rather than just one. (There was a lot of other stuff in 1.5 too, such as plugin hooks and internationalisation, but most people ignored that.) Now, for 2.0.3367whatever/2.5, we’re getting pressured into re-doing the work we did for 1.5 to incorporate their trendy AJAX crap.

If you are hosting WordPress on a paid server and suddenly decide that you would rather have your archives displayed above your categories and recent comments at the top, you do not need widgets to accomplish this. You just need to master cut and paste. And given the huge number of themes out there and the tiny percentage which are adopted for wordpress.com, I kind of think it’s up to the admins to widgetize them rather than expecting hundreds of designers to tweak them on the off-chance that they’ll make the Chosen Few.

I mean, yeah, I have some sympathy for the view that there are too many themes out there and we don’t need any more, but for pity’s sake just say that 1.5 themes will not be fully compatible with 2.5. Not that they are ‘broken’ and ‘need to be fixed’. Theme developers are unpaid volunteers. Some of them may even have lives. They are under no obligation whatsoever to mess with a theme that worked fine a couple of months ago just to serve your addiction to trendy AJAX crap.

So let’s be honest for once about the backwards-compatibility thing: say we’re junking 1.5 and we need shiny new themes by PHP mavens. Or maybe just admit that actually you don’t need anything from people who are not Michael Heilemann, then the rest of us can stop wasting our time and switch to developing for Textpattern.

(Oh, and don’t even get me started on the bizarreness of marking up section headers as <h2> and claiming this to be the ‘most semantically correct’ way of doing things. Sidebar labels are more important than post titles? Only if you believe people’s sidebars are more important than their content. I don’t, but evidently I am alone in this.)

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