[Theme: Photog] Updated version (2011)

Hi Daedalon, I’m the theme author. My old theme site DewDrop Webs was taken down after I had other issues come up and couldn’t put in the time to keep my themes updated. Now I have some time again, and just uploaded a plugin last week. I came to check on that and saw all my old themes, and was about to delete them.

They are very outdated of course, as the WordPress codex has changed significantly since they were written. They would have to be completely redone, and I think the designs are too old to make that worthwhile. Also, the demands for getting a theme approved now are much higher and I don’t know if I want to get back into that.

Plugins seem a lot less demanding. I did make a new theme but haven’t uploaded it because of my themes never seeming to be very popular. You can see a prototype of it at https://www.fether.net and https://news.fether.net, though the style now is neither of those.

Forgot to add the link to the latest version: https://keep2thecode.fether.net/

Good to hear from you! Sorry to hear about your previous site.

I’ve made updates to the Photog theme all throughout the spring 2012. As you mentioned, a lot has changed in WordPress and its documentation since Photog was last updated in 2009.

I’d still say it’s a pretty good theme as it makes most of the first-time visitors say “wow, that’s a serious site you’ve made” on the first look, but would require a maintenance overhaul in order to reduce the bounce rate of visitors and to allow for certain WP 3 niceties.

The main thing would be to make the theme have less of a graphical imprint on the screen so content can really be the king. Biggest culprit is the file https://wp-themes.com/wp-content/themes/photog/images/header.jpg, of which I’d have taken off the light, the lens and the two curvy panels next to it, other one of which has the WordPress logo.

Image editing isn’t my thing and a technically more advanced theme has its benefits, so at the moment I’m looking forward to converting my Photog site to use Elbee Elgee.

There’s lots of good about Photog, so I hope it doesn’t get deleted from the repository. It’s possible to use the version of the theme I have in use now with its 100+ updates (though a few should be reverted as they’re site-specific) or, even better, redo it as an Elbee Elgee child-theme.

I’m not up for the latter task by myself, though, as what I’m looking for when converting my Photog site is to say goodbye to most of the graphical elements in Photog to conserve the valuable screen real estate. If you’d be willing to make a compressed version of the header.jpg, I might be willing to give it a shot, though. Would be good to do the changes gradually in order to not to shock the users.

My schedule for the theme switch would be late Autumn in the earliest, as I’m concentrating on another site in the immediate future.

Glad to hear about your new theme. All of its versions seem like they’d be delightful for some site admins. In themes, it’s best for all of the web when there are many options for site admins to choose from to keep the websites from looking as clones of each other. If I’d make a theme I wouldn’t mind it not getting popular, unless it was a framework theme on which child-themes would be developed. That might be a direction you’d want to go, too: either to make a framework on which you’d also offer different child-themes to cater for site admins with different tastes or needs, or to adopt an already-made framework like Elbee Elgee and to only make child-themes.

I agree, the graphics are a big issue with the Photog theme. As you can see in the Simplastic one, I’ve pretty much done away with that and gone to pure CSS/html5. The plugin I uploaded, theme-tweak, does essentially what a child theme does, except that you just upload any style sheet you want and enter the name in the options. Next week I will update that plugin to also handle icons for favicon, apple-touch icon, and sharing icon. Simplastic is responsive, but not using the grid-layout system, and it has the icon functionality built in for now, though I might remove that and just use the new plugin. And with jetpack, you can make some pretty nice image sliders (though Orbit as used in the iFeature theme looks good too). But I will probably only offer themes at my keep2thecode site rather than the WP repository.

I’ll have to check out your updates to Photog, though it will have to wait till later today as I have other plans for the afternoon. Glad you liked it!

I’ll be glad to keep posted about these. I hit you through the contact form on your site so we can continue about the Photog theme updates there.

Hey Daedalon, I emailed you a while back, hope you got it. Meanwhile, I’ve made a new photo-type child theme for Simplastic, which you can get at my Keep2theCode site.

Haven’t gotten your email, so I sent you a new message through the contact form. Hope all works now.