The Joy of Customization: mimbo3

I was intrigued when I found mimbo2 last year… it seemed to be the perfect layout for a blog idea that a handful of us had been keeping on the back burner for a couple years: Deep Geeking.

The term “Deep Geeking” comes from a description of what we do when we fall into intense analysis and discussion of a topic; in this case, the source topic was Babylon 5 and what we do on the podcast: in-depth discussion of the episodes and the deeper topics of character and theme. I loved the name, and one of the show’s fans registered the domain for our later use. It was 2 years before I actually got around to setting up a website for it.

I liked the way mimbo2 did article images, and my experience with the way arthemia2 handled images made customizing how I wanted those images to appear using mimbo a fairly easy modification to incorporate as well.

I wasn’t 100% happy with my final look at the time, but it served a purpose.

Then along came mimbo3, and most of the nagging questions I had in my mind about some functionality had been addressed… but the part I liked the most about mimbo2 had been excised completely: article image management.

I may be in the minority, but I like Custom Fields for specific image usage and placement. I like having the option to use one image for a thumbnail and having a different image for an internal article image, if there is one. It’s more interesting, to me personally.

So my challenge was to do some extreme hacking on a child theme for mimbo3 to regain that Custom Field image usage that I adore, while keeping the rest of the layout the same. Since the child theme vintagegreen was close in style to the mimbo2 look I liked and wanted, that’s what I used for my base.

While mimbo3 and its use of child themes seemed as if it would be more work at first, needing to only make changes to a child theme changed my mind about using them… I had been ambivalent about them before, but now I see the upside to them. I don’t know if I’m completely sold on them yet, since I’m not the kind of person who’ll update a base theme frequently enough to need a better solution to keeping my customizations, but I can better appreciate the advantages of them now that I’ve had time to work with them.

Site: Deep Geeking
Theme: mimbo3 / vintagegreen (child theme)