The Joy of Customization: arthemia2
I think arthemia and arthemia2 were the first magazine style WordPress themes I came across that caused me to imagine a variety of customized configurations to implement on several websites I had that had been languishing and were badly in need of being transformed.
Since 1996, I’d had two very popular websites on a single domain. In 2008, I decided it was time to clear up the focus of those sites, and finally update them from the hand-rolled HTML sites they’d been stuck on since 2003.
When it came to redesigning wildhorse.com, I wanted to refocus the site to my original idea: equine art and artists, news about wild horse preservation and about equine rescue efforts. That meant that I needed to split off the very popular Miami Vice related content off onto it’s own site, and could not put that task off any longer.
First up was redesigning wildhorse.com to be The Wild Horse. Copying the old HTML listings and converting them to WordPress articles was the easy part, but I spent about a week rearranging the categories several times, just because I wasn’t completely happy with the old designations I’d used. The new site has been up for months, and I’m still tweaking. Redoing the images, and going through all of the old artists links to see what sites are still working and what sites need to be removed from the artists directory is an ongoing task at this point, but the new wildhorse.com launched on August 1, 2008, and has had a pretty decent reception. It’s still going to take a while to get the traffic back up to where it was back in 2003-2004, but that’s for another article.
Next up was creating Miami Vice Chronicles. Setting up the site was a snap, and customizing Arthemia Free was a lot easier and a lot more fun than I’d originally anticipated. But it took nearly two months to convert the several hundred individually hand-rolled HTML pages for the Episode Guide, the Music Guide, the cast information, and the old news and articles into Wordpress articles! Add in the time it took to rework or rescan many of the images (I’d used lower resolution images back in the days before broadband), and the project I’d started in September was finally ready to launch in December. Being the Miami Vice fan that I am, I chose to launch the new site on Dec 15, which is Don Johnson’s birthday.
Since there isn’t a ton of new Miami Vice related news coming out these days, blogging is occasional, but it’s the episode guide and music guide that are the big draw, and I’m hoping the new design and layout of the image galleries and listings still appeal to both the casual and die-hard fan.
Note: the links to both arthemia and arthemia2 download the same theme code, but the first link contains some helpful instructions that are not included in the second link, thus the reason for including both links.
Site: The Wild Horse
Site: Miami Vice Chronicles
Theme: arthemia2 (since renamed Arthemia Free)
The WordPress Hack I Dream Of
I have liked almost every improvement made in WordPress since version 2.1, with two huge, glaring exceptions.
Since many people before me already grumbled and complained about the autosave and revisions updates that initially caused more problems than they resolved, and since I was able to find a solution to it quickly, it wasn’t so big of an issue with my sites. For anyone not familiar with the problem, let’s just say that revisions and podpress do not play well together, and since podcasts are an integral part of my other work, I needed revisions to die quietly, like so many others also did.
The other glaring exception to my love of WordPress was the addition of the “feature” that automatically creates thumbnails from images uploaded through the WordPress media manager. I haven’t noticed any public grumbling about that feature, so I may be alone on this one.
Several of the sites I maintain have a lot of images accompanying them, and they have or use custom image thumbnails that we create for the category and front page listings. The fun part is that we use different images for the thumbnails than we do for the image in the body of the articles, and I think it makes things looks better.
The thumbnails also appear in two different sizes, depending on if it’s being viewed from the main page or the category page, and that’s done with timthumb on one site, and the use of CSS/HTML on another.
The best part about using both methods for the resizing meant I didn’t have to worry about needing several versions of a single image in different sizes… upload one image, and the scripting in the right section of the theme takes care of the resizing where necessary.
Somewhere along the line in the growth of WordPress, the automatic creation of thumbnails for images was added. It happened after I upgraded a few sites in either January or February 2007, so I’m guessing that had to have been included in the release Wordpress 2.1.
I never used the images created from the new thumbnails feature, so I never paid much attention to it… until version 2.5.1 came out.
First, I noticed when the mysqldump backups of that site grew from 20Mb to 50Mb far faster than it had grown from 10Mb to 20Mb. At first, I thought it was from the rapid increase in comments the site was receiving, from a few hundred to a few thousand a week (along with the crazy increase in spam comment attacks… thank you Akismet!)
But I also noticed that the site was taking up a lot more space on the server, and the only explanation for that was an increase in uploaded media. At first, I thought we’d added a lot more video to the site, but I knew it wasn’t enough to account for such a big jump.
When I realized that the month folders in the uploads directory were now much larger in size than a few months before, I poked around. When I noticed that there were now 3 “versions” of every image that was uploaded for an article, instead of the previous original plus generated thumbnail, I was not amused.
I honestly don’t need WordPress to automatically create two thumbnails for every image I upload. Instead, what I need to do these days is go through my uploads every few months and manually delete those thumbnails. That’s cleaning up a couple hundred files files per folder that I didn’t need created in the first place.
Applications shouldn’t have unintended side effects that cause more work, especially not ones as smart and slick as WordPress has become.
There had been an uproar over how many problems with increase in database size and other problems caused by the autosave and the revisions additions that were introduced in WP 2.6, and thank goodness the community came up with immediate workarounds in the forms of adding directives to wp-config.php, and more recently the Post Control plugin.
What I’d really like to see added to WordPress now is the option to turn that thumbnails “feature” off entirely if I want to. Because on almost all of the sites I build and maintain, I really really want to.
I’m not sure yet how much extra space, if any, the references to the thumbnails take up, and my initial thought that the added thumbnails were directly contributing to the huge DB increase might be off base, but I wouldn’t mind seeing if there’d be a way to delete the references to the thumbnails from the database, too.
It’s not vital, but I’d also settle for a quick and dirty mysql command I could run to clean that up, if they’re in there. The database for that one major site grows about 10-12Mb per month. If getting rid of references to thumbnails I don’t use or need can slow that a bit, I’m willing to figure out a way to get that done.
The Joy of Customization
Over the past year, I think I’ve become addicted to customizing WordPress themes.
I have an idea in my head about how I want some of my sites to look like, but I’ve never seen one theme that had all the components or layout areas that I’d imagined. I’d always want one idea from one theme, and another idea from a second theme, and a tweak of an idea from yet another theme.
Isn’t that’s how Dr. Frankenstein started out… or was that Dr. Moreau…
I’ve never had the inclination to write a theme from scratch… as far as I’m concerned, I’ve still got a lot to learn about CSS. But I can read the code, and I know what to change and how to change it to get the look that I want. The same thing goes for tweaking the PHP framework of the themes.
Over the past six months or so, my favorites for customizing have been arthemia2 by Michael Jubel, and the Revolution Two themes (which are no longer free, alas). I had fun with Mimbo2, with both Branford Magazine and Wynton Magazine, and also with the original Revolution themes that were purchased for the massive number of websites that fall under my other creative hat (more on that later).
I ended up using arthemia2 as a base on three consecutive sites. I found myself taking pieces from Revolution Two themes and plugging them into heavily customized Original Revolution themes. I’ve mixed and matched pieces from different themes to get close to a look that I could see in my mind, and sometimes it worked, and other times I had to scrap it and begin again. And in one case, my graphics design weakness became a challenge to sidestep.
But I’m going to continue to see what pieces from what themes I can mix and match into what new concoctions.
I may turn this into a series of what I customized and why, since there were so many that have fallen under the code tweaking knife.
Plugins Smackdown
Unintended consequences can be both exasperating and fun, depending on the circumstances.
When you’re working on a client’s site, discovering that two of your plugins don’t play nicely in the same sandbox can be exasperating. But figuring out which ones are butting heads, and then testing the combination over and over to make sure you’ve got the right combination of culprits can be fun.
That’s really why we have test sites, to see exactly what we can break, and if need be, how many times we can break it!
In this case, discovering that the Featured Content Gallery plugin from the gang over at RevolutionTwo falls down hard when you install the WP e-commerce plugin was amusing at first. When it turned out that the only way to untangle the mess is to manually dig out all of the tables from the WP database because the “Uninstall” feature in WP e-commerce doesn’t work at all, it was mildly annoying.
When further digging led to the knowledge that they are incompatible, and info at the RevTwo forums suggested that a workaround isn’t coming any time soon, it was very disappointing.
Two sites I’m putting together were initially going to use Featured Content Gallery, and third is using Smooth Gallery, which FCG is based on. WP e-commerce breaks both of them, and breaks them hard.
Needing to find two different solutions wasn’t something I had planned on needing to do… but one of the FCG sites didn’t really need to use that plugin, so putting WP e-commerce on there wouldn’t be a problem. When my other client is ready, I’ll be buying the Shopp plugin for her site, and if that plugin does the trick, that’ll be my second alternative.
