As I mentioned in February I had a conundrum - I wasn't sure how to make changes to my theme Elemental without breaking peoples sites. Thankfully the people who read my site are super clever and suggested I create a version 2 and so, over the last month or so, that's exactly what I have started doing.
I am currently in the process of ripping Elemental apart - and near enough rewriting it from scratch - and I thought I would write a bit about the process and the ideas behind what I am doing and why.
Objectives
Web design and development has come a long way since I started building Elemental - and in a similar vein my own skills and knowledge have improved as well - and as such there are a host of things I want to do with the theme that I couldn't do before. Since I now have this opportunity to rewrite everything I am going to take the time to do things properly.
The main things I plan to do are:
- Simplify
- Make better use of built in WordPress functionality
- Use modern web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc)
- Use WordPress programming standards
- Optimise
- Build in support for popular WordPress plugins
Over the next couple of months I will be writing about Elemental 2 and the design and development process. This is so that I can get feedback on what I am doing from the wider WordPress community. If there's anything in particular you would like to know - what I am doing, or how/ why I am doing it - then please do let me know in the comments.
I'm really looking forward to Elemental 2 and your plans make absolutely sense - keeping things more simple, or straight.
I hope Elemental 2 will retain TimThumb. Posting news on a daily basis, TimThump certainly cuts down the mean time to publish an article.
March 28, 2012