Monthly Archives: December 2010

In what is certainly the shortest run of a theme I’ve ever had, I have upgraded from version 4.0 to 5.0 in less than two weeks.  I never even got a chance to write a post in version 4.0 (except for the one announcing it).

So why the rapid change?

First, version 4.0 was good on paper but not in practice.  In mock-ups and localhost testing, it was a nice minimalist theme built with longer text posts in mind.  It didn’t work well with all the content on this site.  I still think the theme has potential, and will continue to work on it for a public release farther down the road.

Second, WordPress has released a beta (now on beta2) of WordPress 3.1.  I use this site as a testing ground and upgrade to beta releases as soon as they are available.  I like testing all the new features, and 3.1 brings some great ones (post formats being a big one, also here).  So with the new features, I needed a new theme that would let me test all this stuff.  Version 5.0 theme was built on WordPress 3.1, with many of the upcoming features enabled and ready for testing.

And last, I just really like the overall look of this theme much better.  It was built from scratch, as all the others.  It was a design that just came together nicely.  I’ve liked it since I first drew a mock up.  This theme should be here to stay for some time.

So tonight I launched version 4.0 of stephenwoicik.com.  The transition was about as not smooth as possible.  This is one of the more drastic changes I’ve done.  Past themes had a lot of flexibility and were built for all kinds of posts.  I’ve changing that now.  The new theme is much more text heavy.  Made for reading longer written posts (by far the most popular ones on the site, and the one I need the most practice at).  By making the theme based around this, I’m forcing myself to practice writing longer and better posts.  Don’t expect many more photo heave posts, they’ll end up going somewhere else.  However, the quotes will always remain.

If you are on the site tonight, I’m well aware of the problems on the homepage.  This site was built with permalinks in mind, and as a result, I neglected some of other pages (index, archive, etc…).  Over the next few days expect to see some changes as I slowly update everything and transition the theme from being on my localhost to a live site.

As with my past designs.  I’ll release a version of this site as a free theme for anyone interested.  Look for a post on that in a week or so.