David’s Technical Musings

I’m a big fan of customization, particularly through the admin UI.  One reason is I host multiple sites from the same set of files using the multi-blogging solution and each site may want to have different features.  The 1 Blog Theme by Javier García is one of the most customizable themes I’ve run into so far.

Overall Grade: B+

Things I like:

• Extremely customizable!
• Very flexible comments UI for post authors.
• Trackbacks are listed separately from comments.
• Multiple sidebars (three on the side, three on the bottom).
  • I think I would prefer if some of these only displayed as options (e.g. enabled from the admin UI).  Sometimes three sidebars are just too much.
  • I tried removing one of the sidebars by setting the width of the left sidebar to 0%, but it still showed the widgets.  When I set added just a single Text widget, the left sidebar disappeared, but the right sidebar was indented.  Setting the width of the left sidebar to 100% and adding a single Text widget to the right sidebar looks better (results in a bigger right margin).  It would be nice, though, to be able to enable and disable the right sidebar.
• Sidebars collapse into a single sidebar if the width of the window gets too narrow.  Absolutely amazing!
• Lots of metadata is shown (related posts, categories, tags, subscriptions, bookmarking, etc.).
• Custom widgets for several different types of information (control panel, logging in, search, subscribe, archives, calendar, categories, pages, bloggers, favorites, latest posts, latest comments, most commented, tags, theme switcher, you are currently viewing).
• Links to pages can be displayed at the top.
• Supports both fluid and fixed width through the admin UI.
• Comments are displayed with alternating shading.
• Comments supported on pages.
• Nice large font for content.
• Built-in support for WP-PostNav-like support (doesn’t use the plugin).
• Blockquotes are indented properly and use a vertical line to the left.
• Lists display list item markers properly.
• Some SEO control through the admin UI.
• Great support for feeds in the categories and tags widgets.
• Flexible support for ads.  I wasn’t able to test this, though, because I don’t put ads on my blogs (yet?).
• Explicit support for WordPress-MU.  I don’t use it, but it’s pretty cool that it supports it.
• Many more features that I haven’t had a chance to evaluate yet.  Go to the theme web site for more info.

Things I don’t like:

• Content for the "You are currently viewing" widget is pulled from the about.php file.  This doesn’t work if multiple blogs are using the same set of files.
• A lot of metadata is displayed so it is sometimes hard to distinguish the content from the metadata.
• The overall look of the theme is somewhat plain.
• The tagline isn’t displayed.
• Provides its own favorite icon which is displayed as the browser or tab icon for the site.
• I would prefer to see the arrow symbol between the site name and the post name on the title instead of a colon.  This is very easy to change, though.
• Blogroll links are not displayed grouped by their categories.
• No distinction between visited and unvisited links.
• Categories and tags widgets don’t use an RSS icon for the feed link.
• Can’t disable display of post counts in categories, tags, and archives widgets.  I would probably not disable them in most blogs, but there are some that I probably would.
• Point at which left and right sidebars combine doesn’t work for all widths of sidebars.  When I set the width too small making the window larger expanded the sidebar when there wasn’t enough space for both sidebars.

Conclusions

There are some really great ideas in this theme that I’d like to use in my other themes.  Although the actual design isn’t too terribly creative, technically it represents a great deal of artistry.  Note that my comments about design could also be partially due to my own lack of skill at configuring it in a way that is more artistic.  I gave this theme a B+ only because I don’t think I can use it the way it is - it’s just too plain.  I’m still working on figuring out how I can leverage some of the terrific ideas for other themes as well.