A Better Theme Resource
The biggest news that is now ancient (two days old) is the reborn WordPress Theme Viewer at themes.wordpress.net, which is really quite lovely. Thomas of theundersigned.net did some fantastic work with some others (read the official announcement) to make something truly useful. And that is quite an accomplishment.
First of all, note the ample use of negative space. I’m going to avoid calling it “white” space because it’s not always necessarily white. I think it’s great that there are download links right there on each page—no need to travel through layers just to get the damn thing.
Also: permalinks. This is really wonderful. For example, if I mention how you can comment/vote on themes, I can also say, Hey, go and vote for blog.txt or maybe Simplr or Barthelme, etc., or veryplaintxt, plaintxtBlog, etc. You get the idea. Very useful for theme authors.
Observations on the Theme Viewer
A couple comments are warranted too. While the design is really wonderful, just the kind of site I enjoy, there is something that I envision differently. For example,
Looks great, right? Well, it does. But I see a thumbnail and wonder what this theme is. Have I seen it before? Is that a new Hemingway theme? And so on. The theme title is shown (a) in the link title and (b) on the theme page. I can argue, however, that the name of a theme is its least important characteristic. Well, it is. Is the mouse-over text suffecient? Probably.
My final observation is related to the ever-so-cool permalinks that make the Theme Viewer easily extendible to the Web. Let’s say my Simplr theme needs an update. I’ve just discovered this nasty typo in the 404 template file.
Whatever. So I write a nice email to Thomas with the new theme zip for version 1.4.1 attached and he updates it and everything is beautiful—except the permalink. For example, the Simplr permalink is http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/23/simplr-11b/, but the current version is actually 1.4.1.
However! I can just use the permalink http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/23/, sans the theme name/version, and get the same result. I’m not sure the technicals of this, but hey, it’s just an observation.
adam wrote:
thomas’ design is gorgeous, indeed.
i’m happy enough with the name as the link title, but then again, my theme has a graphic header.
i noticed the permalink naming thing as well, but i see that more as a safegaurd than a real issue. thomas has been updating the post title for each theme, so when you arrive at the page, it won’t be confusing. permalinks are generally only for SEO, anyway, most people don’t actually look at them. and using the version number allows him to have multiple versions of a theme (rounded corners V2, K2, and other ’sequel’ themes)
Posted 19 Jun 2006 at 4:47 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Good point with the sequel themes. Yes, the permalinks really don’t matter. It would be cool if they could be written so the theme ID number was only necessary, like
/theme/383.But wow, in function and form, what a huge step forward from the last site.
Posted 19 Jun 2006 at 4:56 pm ¶