In which we discuss WordPress themes, plugins and the merits of selectivity

Less still means more. I’ve been testing out WordPress themes on this website over the last few days to find something to replace the old standby, Mandigo. In the end, I have based the current look of the site on an elegant piece of theme-making called “Modicus Remix” by Art Culture. In a lot of ways, both themes appeal to me but are in start contrast to one another. In arriving at Modicus Remix I sampled a number of themes, rethought the purpose of this site and decided that what I wanted to do with it. Here, in a pithy design critique, we look at the themes Mandigo and Modicus Remix and a few other themes that break the typical “blog” mold and range between the simple and the overly wrought.

Mandigo

As of this writing, Mandigo stands at version 1.27.1. I want to start with it because it’s the theme that this site kicked off with over the summer and I was, and remain, impressed with it on a number of levels.

Created by the design house onehertz, the description give at their website doesn’t quite live up to the reality. Mandigo isn’t only “widget-ready,” it’s entire management interface seems like one big widget itself.

With seven color schemes to choose from and instant 800 or 1024 screen width designs to choose from, it’s pretty much the ultimate for those who really just want to plug-in and play. The header image need only be updated by dropping photos into a folder, the sidebars can be remixed with WordPress widgets and the theme options cover a number of variables, allowing for push-button customization on a number of levels. In short, it’s an incredible feat of coding genius that aims at giving the user tons of versatility that require no touching of the actual files that make up the theme.

And you really don’t want to touch those files. Really, it’s a pain in the ass to mess with them. This is part of what led me away from Mandigo, but also led me to another idea: that, for the purposes of speedy loading, bandwidth, CPU capacity and general screen pollution (I’ll get to that in a little bit), I needed to put drew3ooo on a diet. It was time to put down the WordPress how-to manual and pick up a copy of Skinny Bitch for my website.

Limitations

After having gushed about the plug-n-play versatility Mandigo, this next bit may seem contradictory at first. Mandigo was incredibly limiting. I wanted to do far more than the theme options offered, but digging through the unique theme architecture was a chore that often ended in futility. One gets the idea that the theme should really come with a “keep out” sign over the actual php files. Mandigo is put together like no other theme, and so altering headers, pages, archives and so forth is no small feat, and doing so can come at some great cost to the operation of the rest of the design. And there are a ton of them to go through. A lot of this is to allow for the push-button method of customizing, but while Mandigo offers more of this than most themes, it doesn’t offer so much that you won’t want to get under the hood at some point. I wasn’t too pleased with the following:

• Images: Your choice is to have all images wrap around text or not wrap at all. Mandigo ignores the attributes you give to an image while putting it in a post and uses one of these two options.
• Text formatting: Mandigo ignores a lot of text formatting that you might want to do. Also, the justified text played havoc with image wrapping, considering how narrow the blog column was. Sometimes you want to un an image big, and it didn’t accommodate for that sort of range of use.
• Columns: Choose a two-column or three-column option and then live with it. I tend to like a three-column front with the left column taking a hike for individual posts and pages, but getting Mandigo to do this took some doing.

Loading time and CPU capacity

Mandigo starts off quick but when you load it with content, the sloth picks up when it comes to page loads. It’s hardly the low-calorie option among WordPress themes. The very nice Web 2.0 feel, cruise control administration may make it a Cadillac Eldorado among themes, but it sucks CPU like a Hummer does gas on Interstate-5. Graphics heavy and lots of variables to figure out per page load takes a toll and I noticed it lagging more and more as time wore on. Doing any sort of template editing periodically led to CPU time outs and all the add-ons that my particular design had weren’t helping. And this leads to…

Screen Pollution: the result of plugin binging

One caveat before entering this territory: Blaming the layout tool for a blogger’s insatiable appetite for sidebar dittery dos and header thingamajigs is like blaming McDonald’s for fat people. Yeah, I got a kick out of Supersize Me, and it was all very insightful about fastfood culture, but people are still responsible for stuffing themselves with crappy, no-health-value food. Fastfood joints just make it easier for people to eat really poorly. Mandigo is the drive-thru of WordPress themes and my site started getting overloaded with extra helpings of, well, everything. It made it easy, but I heaped it on. If it were bacon cheeseburgers, my website would have clogged arteries and a heart attack.

Remember the episode of the Simpsons when Homer made a website? That episode is to website developers what the monorail episode must have been for Seattle city council members. It’s full of all these little doo-dads and pop-up thingies and it isn’t until he become the blogger Mr. X that he becomes famous. It’s that tendency toward screen pollution that you see on Myspace pages and horrible fansites with multiple counters and little animated dancing chipmunks and, I don’t know lots of crap that slows down your load time. I started thinking my Mandigo site looked a little like Homer’s bloated, pre-Mr. X website and I think it was around the time I was adding some stupid widget that listed the widgets used on the site that I decided it was time to do something different. I mean, I’m just not that meta.

I think the underlying issue was that it never really looked good to me on its own. I kept thinking it needed more. And to the creator’s credit, Mandigo had the fewest conflicts with third-party plugins out of any theme I’ve tried out. And with its bold look, rich colors, hefty typefaces, emptiness just didn’t fit. Long posts of text weren’t as suited for it so much as flashy buttons, pictures and moving things. Mandigo urged me to binge. I spent too much time fussing with site functions and not enough actually creating content. It was time to purge.

Crash dieting

I wanted a theme that brought the focus back to content, had fewer images to load as part of its design and consisted of fewer files to keep track of. I wanted to lighten the load. At some point when life allows I will create a theme from scratch, but for the time being I want something that loads fast, look consistent in the various browsers and is fairly easy on the eyes. To date some of my favorite site designs are the most simple. For the scroll-down blog variety, McSweeney’s still stands out to me as an ideal to pursue. Nothing there but words.

So instantly, I headed in the other direction, starting with the following:

Recycled Canvas: Stylish, but a little too tight around the sides

OK, so this creation by the folks at The Creative Synthesis Collaborative isn’t exactly the wrong direction. It’s not nearly as sugar coated as my previous theme, but it’s hardly without some meat on its bones.

Testing out Recycled Canvas is like trying out a sofa in the Urban Outfitters furniture department. Often hip, but not that comfortable for every rump. There are some ideal places I could see using it, but it wasn’t a good fit for d3.

Recycled Canvas is more than just another WordPress theme, its an experiment being run by a group from the Context Aware Computing Group at MIT’s Media Laboratory. Essentially, use the theme and the plugin it comes with and you’ll be part of the hive collecting information on how people use, share and process information online. Mousetracking data. There has been some grimacing on the occasional WorPress blog here and there over Recycled Canva’s lack of a Creative Commons or GPL, meaning, if you use it, you’re agreeing to their own recycled learning license.

The only thing that separates this from a CC license is the bit stating “The work requires a ‘mechanism for learning’, ” which would of course be the previously mentioned plugin that gathers data and ships it back to their servers (you also get access to it as well as access to the data other participants are using).

Essentially if you use the theme you agree to install a wordpress plugin that collects some data and sends it back to us. Mostly we’re after mousetracking data - the x,y coordinates that your visitors send their mouse tails to. For more information about this, see Ernesto Arroyo’s short paper on the mousetracking tools. This data is completely available for anyone to see (including, unfortunately, unscrupulous types like advertisers - although commercial uses are technically forbidden by the terms of the license). The intent is to use this for academic research in how people share designs, use blogs, and a variety of other purposes. It takes a few minutes to sink in, so please read the license details before you click download.

Some people blanch at all this “requirement” business and others are a little worried about the visitor tracking going on. I had no problem with either of these aspects. The guys made a solid, versatile theme that has a unique look and is easy to configure without getting into the php code. One can essentially turn it on and go, much in the way of the Mandigo theme, selecting their own looks with the click of a few option buttons. But they will eventually stuck with limited options unless they want to roll up the sleeves and really take it apart and put it back together. Like Mandigo, Recycled Canvas wasn’t really made for people to get under the hood, and it doesn’t put back together that easy once you start.

Also, while it seems to work well for a fresh website that has yet to have much content added, switching over to Recycled Canvas mid-blog can be a chore as a lot of older posts may not well with its design.

I like the looks of the Recycled Canvas theme, and even more so the experiment, and may still employ the plugin aspect if it’s possible without doing more work than my attention span can tolerate. I messed with the theme for an evening before ditching it for other more pliable alternatives, but this was mostly due to the fact that I didn’t like how a lot of the older posts were showing up in it. Also, I found the front page of Recycled Canvas a bit limiting. I still keep a copy of Recycled Canvas in the hopes of implementing it in some project at some point that suits its design and am eager to see what The Collective’s upcoming magazine theme will look like.

A Catwalk of WordPress Waifs

I tore through the list of The Best Minimalist WordPress Themes at PlainText.Org and it set me on the path of righteousness in my quest for a bare-bones design. These offerings are the web design equivalent of Bauhaus. if you’re looking to take an oath of abstinence from wallpaper jpegs, color in general, header images and graphic-laden design, this is your resource list. A few minimalist themes don’t even allow for the posting of photos, which is a little more scaled down than I was looking to go. My words aren’t that pretty, and sometimes I like to post the occasional embarrassing photo of my wife or embed a strange YouTube video involving rabbits. But many of these were sturdy, nice little designs that were quite adaptable. Zen Minimalist was a close contender for this site, as was White As Milk.

(Note: I just noticed that my Movement Studio cohort Dave Reed actually started a redesign of our company’s site using White As Milk. No wonder I took to it.)

The PlainText.Org list was solid, and gave me ideas about what I wanted, and more ideas about what wasn’t needed, but wasn’t where I found my current choice.

Those themes were all elegant, thin runway models, but there was a bit missing behind the scenes. I still wanted something that would render the occasional photo and video well enough, one that had widgets enabled, and came with a stronger of a sense of originality. Hot looks and brains.

Modicus Remix

If you’ve dropped by the website Art Culture (and you should), d3 may look a little familiar. I hope not too familiar. One of the problem with WordPress themes is the tendency of creeping ubiquity. I noticed this in the months after a mad-dash effort to create a website for the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project website. The deadline was tight and so I ended up doing a light modification of the Connections theme from Vanilla Mist. It wasn’t long before I noticed that the same theme used by upstart anti-censorship group Muzzle Watch, and then used again by one other Palestine-related site that currently escapes me, but is probably not missed on the likes of David Horowitz, who I’m sure finds identical theme choice all the more fodder for his Discover the Networks conspiracy.

I found Modicus Remix after looking at a few similar grid-style design themes. I don’t recall the Google bullion that led me to it, but it likely could have included “minimal wordpress theme stable widgets light sexy” because that’s what Modicus Remix offered.

I plan to actually continue lightening the load to pull more of the focus back to content. The theme has maybe four colors, which I’ve reduced to three, red, black and brown. Modicus Remix comes with some header images meant to be subbed out with a user’s own. I’ve mostly disabled most of these, and plan to do away with the rest fairly soon. My fixation on big alternating header images has long since been sated and I’m now addicted to monitoring page load times to see how I can speed them up. I doubt it’s healthy, and probably stems from whatever it is that drives anorexics when they get on the scale before hitting the toilet after lunch.

What I like about Modicus Remix is the typography and use of lines. I also appreciate the small number of php files that make up the design, all with clean code, easily decipherable and fairly painless to alter, because it’s so damned clean. Modicus also uses something a lot of theme developers have left behind, and that’s small, single-color repeating gifs to make up the graphic elements of the site as opposed to big picture files. I also appreciate the lack of PhotoShopping. I love me some PhotoShop elements. But a lot of sites rely on it way too much as if they’re actually going to trick the site visitor into thinking they are reading a post on parchment paper or are really looking at something that is laying on a table and thus needs to have a shadow.

As a designer I’ve been coming around to a simple concept: We are designing websites. It’s all right to make them look like websites. Architecture that really works blends the structure in with the environment that surrounds it. The environment surrounding a website is a computer. As of this writing, all websites are viewed via computer screens. Most website visitors are toiling at PCs with Windows installed and suffer under the belief that they have to use Internet Explorer. As website designers the best we can do for these people is offer some sort of calming reprieve from the daily turmoil they face, and hope that our links to Apple.com and Firefox downloads offer them some hope that another world is possible. Outside of that, we can look at colors, font choice, use of lines and, yes, those cool PhotoShop and Flash elements with regards to how they help the visitor navigate websites and enjoy looking at websites.

Eventually when I get into unique theme development, the first one I make for myself will likely be based on much of the same look and feel as Modicus Remix, in which case it will have to be called Modicus Remix² or “Remix Remix” or “Remix Redux” or something with adequate homage because my lightly modded version of Modicus Remix is itself a mod of the theme made by Upstart Blogger Robert Ellis (his site’s for sale, so you can buy it and then pretend to be the Upstart Blogger yourself, I imagine much in the same way that the Dread Pirate Roberts mantel kept getting passed in the Princess Bride).

Ellis has some fantastic themes for download, by the way, that follow the mantras of simplicity, grace and cleanliness, while escaping the typical trappings of “bloggy” WordPress sites. I’m taken with his magazine-like designs, Upstart Blogger Minim and Futurosity. Both are worth tinkering with if you’re looking for something a bit different and not already everywhere.

Personally, I like the potential of the Futurosity theme much better than I like its implementation at the Futurosity website. Having prefaced this graph with kudos now, I think Art Culture’s Modicus Remix is a big improvement on the original Modicus. The two are actually quite different and I wouldn’t immediately recognize them as being on the same evolutionary tree.

Anyway, this is it. The new hairdo on drew3ooo. As always, a work in progress. Try for design minimalism: Keep the weight in the content and off the server.

Tags: design, InterWeb, WordPress

Browse Timeline

• « Website undergoing elective cosmetic surgery
• » Hey, do you know Even?

Related Entries

An attempt at consolidation...Scruffy hometown blog is a fun read...Disasters, natural or otherwise…...Sometimes I take work home...Iraq war memorial in Olympia...

Comments (1 Comment)

Add a Comment