A Wild Vista

If you’ve visited the WildVista blog at all over the last couple of months, you’ll notice the major change in the site’s design that I put live yesterday. From the beginning, I envisioned a site that was less like a typical reverse-chronological blog (I’m not writing a real-time diary), and more a magazine-style site with categorised articles and regular features. And so, I’ve now applied (and modified) Darren Hoyt’s superb Mimbo theme to the site.

Mimbo is a free, magazine-style theme for WordPress.

I particularly like the ease with which Mimbo enables one to create graphically rich feature pages. The first photo in any post is automatically detected, resized to a thumbnail, and then inserted alongside excerpt text on the home page, and within category pages. It’s this greater use of images that’s led me to drop the original banner image (though I do miss it — might have to think of a way to work it back in…).

I’ve also tweaked the default theme a fair bit, making a number of CSS style adjustments to get things layed out as I want. This has also introduced me to a feature of WordPress that I was previously unaware of — child themes. The problem with installing a new theme, and then tweaking it to meet your needs, is that, when the theme is upgraded, all these changes will be lost.

You could simply not upgrade the theme, but this isn’t likely to be a sensible approach in the long term. As the WordPress platform itself is upgraded (often to fix security-related bugs, but also to introduce useful new features), the theme you’re using may also need upgrading if it is to continue to work correctly with the latest version of WordPress. By creating a child theme, you can make wide-ranging modifications, without having to worry about redoing this work when it’s time to upgrade the theme.

I’ve really just scratched the surface when it comes to WordPress theming, but am now happy that this approach will greatly reduce the pain of future upgrades. And with that, I’ve got a bunch of draft posts in the pipeline, ready to populate my newly streamlined categories. (Not convinced the “Atmospheric Optics” category is going to make the cut though — not unless I can create considerably more content!)

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