The Agony of the Theme Selection

I have used WordPress since 2005. One of the decisions I have made has been to change the look of the Texbiker.net. In WordPress this can be controlled by changing the theme. This can looked at as the search for the Holy Grail. I want a unique look and style but at the same time the budget is low since Texbiker.net is not a commercial venture. It would be difficult to count the number of themes I have tried both in public as well as using theme preview.

More than once I moved to a different theme to then change back because a key element does not work or meet the look or style I want. Even worse is when a change was made and a key function was lost. The plugin I use the most is Event Calendar. In some themes Event Calendar would not format properly or just plain did not work. In the Event Calendar email newsletter the most frequent question is theme related.

For some applications theme selection is a one time event but not me. I have agonized back and forth many times on the blogs I have created for myself and others.

For a couple of years I have been using various versions of the Atahualpa theme from BytesForAll. The attractive feature I like most is the flexibility of the layout and widgets. This is the theme driving 3mailat.com.

WordPress Houston February Meetup

The February 21st meeting of the Houston WordPress Meetup group was held at the Zebec Center. Eric Rasch provided an indepth recap of how he built a WordPress based website for the John Ritter Foundation. The slide presentation is on the internet.

I found Eric’s approach to creating the theme was very different from I expected. He used some coding frameworks rather than a fully built theme.

If you are interested in learning more about WordPress I recommend that you join the Meetup group at www.meetup.com.