You can’t get there from here

By Shamus Posted Saturday Jun 16, 2007

Filed under: Rants 8 comments

For fun, I banged together a new theme for WordPress. You can see a demo of it at my crappy sandbox blog. It doesn’t really suit Twenty Sided, but I’m thinking it might be of use to someone out there. This morning I decide to upload it to wherever themes come from. It turns out that place is themes.wordpress.net. I visit “the official theme directory” of WordPress to upload my work, where I learn that:

  1. In order to make your theme public, you must upload it to the server.
  2. In order to upload a theme you must create an account.
  3. Creating accounts is currently disabled.

See if you can spot the weak link in the chain.

Geeze, this isn’t helping anyone. Yeah, yeah, if you hunt around on the site you’ll eventually stumble on the directions for how to contact the admin and maybe get yourself an account in “three business days”. It took me about four hours to make the theme, and it will now take me three days just to get it onto the server? Lame. I’m not even going to bother.

If anyone digs the theme, you can download it here: Luddite for WordPress. It’s small. Very small. Just 4 modest files. The CSS is small enough that you can open it in a text editor and see the whole thing at once, as opposed to the twenty-page monoliths you see floating around. I like it. Tastes may vary.

 


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8 thoughts on “You can’t get there from here

  1. DocTwisted says:

    I like it, it looks clean. Though I must admit knowing zero about WordPress.

    Whoa… did I just get the first post?

  2. Shamus says:

    Yup. About thirteen hours after the post went up.

    It’s always slow around here on the weekends. I strongly suspect most people read this site at work. :)

  3. Jack says:

    Decent and clean layout.

    Not sure about the vertical text.

  4. Alden says:

    The Movable Type site has problems too – I submitted something to the plugin directory, then realised that their directory hasn’t been updated since the start of February…

    Elegant theme. :)

  5. Author says:

    Coincidentially I had to work on a WordPress theme for my just-hatched blog. Of course I started by taking a pre-existing one. But man, did I look at dozens of them before understanding the state of the field. I suppose that being fresh out from that ordeal lets me critisize your theme… hopefuly.

    To my eye, the theme still looks a bit extravagant. Those extra lines, wow. Unusual.

    What is up with the miniscule fonts? The first thing I’ve done to Whiteasmilk was to comment all { font-size: }. As a side note, Twenty Sided uses normal fonts and everyone is happy… But apparently wordpress themers just love torturing readers. Almost all I saw were just like the Luddite.

    Otherwise, looks nice.

  6. Shamus says:

    Interesting. To me Luddite and Twenty Sided have the same font size. Obviously some screwy CSS going on there. I’ll check it out.

  7. Dan says:

    Whoa. I completely dig the look. If I steal it for an unyet created blog, I’ll let you know.

    In any case, really sweet!

    Yes, I wrote “sweet.”

  8. Blue_Pie_Ninja says:

    Too bad your side blogs like Lexicon aren’t working. Damn, wanted a preview without downloading. :( oh well.

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