Gravitational Pull

Changing themes at Buckingham Palace

Posted on 23 April 2009

Well, I was getting a little tired of my Wordpress theme, Mandigo. Not that it wasn’t great but I find myself in the mood for something different after just about two years of no change. I’ve opted for a much simpler, cleaner, and less busy look using a theme called SubtleFlux by an unknown author (nada on his or her about page). I found it by perusing the useful Wordpress theme listing page.

Unlike Mandigo, which adds a massive list of options to your Wordpress dashboard, everything from widths and colors to drop shadow and bullet point choices, Subtle Flux leaves it to you to recode the basic files if you want to alter anything in its basic design. For example, to have it list only a few of my pages up top (instead of all of them), I had to go mucking around in its header.php file and learn about how the wp_list_pages tag works.

Another big difference is that this column of blog posts and the column at right with the search box and recent comments and so on are set at a pretty wide fixed width. You can’t see everything unless you widen you browser window. Mandigo and many other themes set things for narrower viewing so visitors won’t have to resize their browser window as often resize the column widths to fit everything in view in your browser. Not sure I like that but we’ll see.

So far, it also seems to be playing nice with all my widgets and junk like Disqus, GoodReads and MyBlogLog.