New themes

My old theme, Journalized Blue, didn’t quite survive yesterday’s WordPress upgrade. I’ve downloaded Journalized v2 (beta), but while I was at it I decided to go “theme shopping”. I was looking for a 2- or 3-column fluid layout–<rant>I hate it when web pages don’t display properly merely because my browser window’s geometry isn’t what the author expects!</rant> Anyway…

I found Srini G‘s Fluid Blue theme. Nearly a perfect fit, it’s a two-column theme that’s truly fluid! (Lots of the “fluid width” themes on the WordPress Theme Viewer are merely fixed-width themes that center themselves in wider-than-expected browser windows and pop up horizontal scroll bars in “narrow” windows. Oops! Ranting again…) It also supports sidebar widgets, which I’d like to fiddle with. Added bonus: version 1.1 is ultra-fresh, having been released a mere three days ago.

Now, in spite of the above rants, I found a fixed-width theme that I just can’t do without: Dean J. Robinson‘s Redoable is gorgeous! I’m gonna have to see if I can hack that into a fluid layout. Even if I can’t fluidize it, I’ll keep the theme around just so I can gawk at it once in a while with a theme switcher.

Speaking of theme switchers, I stumbled across an excellent how-to for Ryan’s theme previewer over on YGG: How to work on your blog without anyone having the slightest clue. Granted, installing a WordPress plugin is easy: Upload to your wp-content/plugins directory, then activate via the Plugins tab on the admin interface. (Still, it would have been good to include those instructions in the plugin.) The thing I found very cool about Travis’ post on YGG was how he’s using the theme previewer to tweak/debug themes and/or plugins without exposing the code-in-progress to his viewers. Great thinking!

So now I’ve got some new themes to play with. I had to disable the old theme switcher, since it wasn’t working quite right under WP 2.2.2. “Fluid Blue” is the theme du jour, at least for the time being…