Pardon our Progress

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If you’ve visited SilverPen Publishing at all this week, you’ve probably noticed a few changes. For a while, I’ve been making plans about redoing the website; changing the theme, moving things around, and ditching (parts of) my content management system (CMS). We are currently on revision 3 of SilverPen Publishing, and while it has been the most solid version yet, it has also had its fine frustrations.

I’m getting closer to having a finished site, and as such, the big problems are gone and done with. This means that the little problems have more weight than they used to, and one of those I recently needed to overcome was WordPress-MU. When I began working on rev.3, I elected to go with MU due to the organization of my site. I wanted everything to be in a blog, rather than a static page, and I wanted central administration over the various blogs. MU was perfectly suited for this, but I ran into some problems along the way. A variety of plugins didn’t work, and MU didn’t store files in the standardized way I had come to expect WordPress to behave.

I worked around these problems until recently, when MU stopped upgrading correctly. One of the big draws for me with WordPress-MU was the ability to upgrade all blogs from a single interface, but as of two versions ago, the upgrade began breaking my site for some reason. A number of other people were experiencing the same problem with their self-hosted blogs, and I had it happen on two separate upgrades, but there was no patch or solution. I finally got fed-up dealing with the limited functionality of MU and moved back to WordPress proper.

At the same time, I was shopping for a new theme. While browsing around the intertubes, I stumbled upon Felicia Day’s site and fell in love with her theme. I could tell it had a few issues, but I really liked it, and began seriously considering purchasing it. The theme is available from Woo Themes for $70, and that alone kept me from writing a check; I use all open source software, and while I don’t mind paying for something, $70 for a theme seemed pretty steep to me. Still, it is awesome, and I may end up getting it someday.

First, though, I wanted to try a couple of other (free) themes. I asked my friend Ryan, who happens to be a web designer, if he could recommend any solid ones. Ryan pointed me to Smashing Magazine, which listed a lot of good themes, so I grabbed one that particularly appealed to me and tried it out. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, the theme didn’t seem to fit despite how nice it was: it didn’t convey my personality or anything about me at all, and even I was shocked when I looked at my site throughout the week. On top of that, something within the theme was conflicting with both Google Analytics and WordPress Stats, preventing any statistic gathering I would normally do. I had to revert to my old theme.

Then I saw a news item on my WP dashboard announcing a new theme by Alex King. I’m a big fan of Alex’s work, and decided to give the theme a try. As you can see (if you’re reading this on my site), it’s pretty awesome. A way better fit for this site and my personality than Dilectio was, and it has some really nice features as well.

On top of that, from what I can tell, my plugins and stat gathering programs all still work. I’ve written a new page talking about the various writing projects ongoing at SilverPen Publishing, and have added a few nice features to the site, such as breadcrumbs and some commenting doo-dads.

I wanted to get something better in place before NaNoWriMo starts, because I won’t have time to work on the site that month at all and my traffic might go up some once I dump a few tens-of-thousands of words onto this. Satisfied with my work for the site, I’ll leave it be for at least a month or two, then reevaluate the question of purchasing a more professional theme.

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