Child Theme Review: Great Design. Code starting to show its age. ????

If you’re reading this, my real rating is 4 stars. However, that rating only makes sense if you read the actual review.

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If you won’t be working with the code of this theme much, you can mostly ignore this feedback (minus the bit that impacts accessibility). That the theme still looks good and works well after 4 years is a testament to simple, clean code.

I love the look of this theme and if you want to use it straight out of the box, you probably should.

I decided to use this as the base for a fairly elaborate child theme. In the end, I should have simply overwritten the theme given how much I’ve changed it. In working with the theme, I ran into some out-dated coding practices that I’d love to see improved.

• The theme is not written with HTML5 elements which improve landmark accessibility.
• The theme uses title attributes on elements. Those should be removed.
• There are some heading hierarchy issues.
• The theme uses icon fonts rather than a more modern system like SVGs. The alignment of those icons was off when I changed the font (flexbox to the rescue!).
• The CSS relies on max-width media queries rather than mobile-first min-width queries.
• The Gutenberg alignwide style is identical to the alignfull style.
• Having at least one widget area (footer) would be really nice.
• Not having the menu toggle next to the mobile menu and the search toggle next to the search field in the source order makes me nervous about screen reader and keyboard accessibility. I’m still in the testing phase and may need to clean those up a bit more.

In these end, these were all issues I resolved myself in the child theme, but it took more time than expected given the simplicity of the theme, and I ended up overriding nearly every template. I’d recommend making at least the minor accessibility-related changes.