DVD Guide Blog

I tinkered with the Revolution Magazine, Revolution Tech, and Revolution Pro Media themes for a while, but I quickly identified several issues that will need to be resolved before any of those themes will be ready to deploy for regular use, so I switched WordPress back to the default theme for now.  Expect more Revolution Themes tinkering soon, though; I didn’t just spend a few hundred dollars on them to not use them.

I have licensed the Revolution Themes for WordPress by Brian Gardner (all of them via his All-Inclusive Developer Package) and started to experiment with them. If anything here looks or feels broken, that probably means I am actively working with a theme, so please just check back in a few minutes or so.

There are definitely a few things I do not like about the Revolution Themes, starting with the clunky handling of their various dependencies upon included but non-standard plugins. Strangely, these plugins are provided within their respective individual theme folders, from which they must be moved to the main plugins folder. After that move, they must still be separately activated within the WordPress administration system. So the non-obvious installation process is a bit clunky, but this is the worst part:

The theme—in this case, Revolution Magazine—does not bother to check whether a non-standard plugin upon which it depends is actually available before attempting to use it. Had it done so, it could have provided a more elegant, informative, and useful message; even just one of those would have been an improvement.  Had it done so, I might not have been primed with annoyance then exposed to the fact that the Revolution Magazine theme depends upon a function named “the_content_limit”, which struck my annoyance-primed self as doubly stupid because the name is a noun even though the function is not a constructor and because the name contains a definite article.

If you don’t understand what any of that means, feel free to pretend.  You could just nod knowingly and say something like “Pshyeah! The WordPress conventions of using nouns for verb-appropriate function names are functionally stupid—like calling functions tags” as though you understood everything and knew it to be true years ago.  Appropriately condescending facial expressions are optional.

I do like the looks of the some of the Revolution Themes, of course.  Hopefully I will be able to work through any remaining functional annoyances quickly so I can just concentrate on getting some great content up on some great-looking blogs.

I have not been announcing WordPress upgrades for a while, but since the last such announcement was made quite a while ago and I have not posted any other content since then, it was starting to look as though I had stopped paying attention to WordPress releases. Well, I didn’t, so here is another announcement just so anybody who checks will know that I am keeping the software on the site current even when I haven’t posted any real content for quite a while.

I have installed WordPress 2.3.3. As usual, I did a clean installation of all files instead of upgrading the previous installation, but I kept the extant database.