Hey look! A new theme!
I have spent the past couple of days getting the theme updated to something a little more modern. It looks mostly the same as the old one but there are a few differences.
Easier to manage!
With the old theme, I took a base Foundation theme and modified it from scratch. While this did work, it took a lot of time and was a very hacky solution. I am now using Beaver Builder to manage the layout of the site. I must say, I was able to do in about 5-6 hours of actual work (mostly just fixing and tweaking) what took me a couple of weeks with Foundation. It also aligns more with how WordPress is supposed to be used instead of doing everything through coding and in the back end.
I also now have a local test environment set up so I can test things before pushing to the live site instead of using the live site as my test environment. I used to do this back in the day with Docker on Windows but that turned out to be more of a headache than useful thanks to a notorious bug that would start containers before mounting volumes so you lose all of your data… But now, I am using Local by Flywheel. It makes it VERY easy to set up and manage any number of WordPress instances. It includes many features such as access to many tools that I did not know existed. I will be trying these out in the near future. If I like them, I will make a post about them.
Both of these suggestions were suggested to me by my fiend Sixteenbit (Site under construction at time of writing). Sixteenbit is an awesome website developer and also does a lot of 3D printing. Go and give him a visit!
Changes
With the new theme, there have also been a few changes.
First, colors have been limited to a palette. I have narrowed all the colors down to ~5. This includes things like borders, tables, widgets, content, etc. Borders used to be a few different colors themselves because I would come up with a random hex and use what was close enough. But now they are all #c4c4c4. Hooray uniformity!
With the new theme, it also comes with many upgrades and fixes. The is now properly responsive looks pretty good on mobile, large items now scale and don’t go off screen, pixels have been changed to scale… This would have taken SO MUCH WORK with the old theme.
Blocks got a facelift!KBD is going to be used for searches and clicking
Code will be used for changes
are good for
multi line code
I think these look MUCH better than the black and grey blobs from before. They also fit in with the theme much better.
Widgets have gotten a facelift! The titles look more exciting and the content is better organized. With each post, you will now see a table of contents for the post. This is a floating widget that will stay on the screen while you scroll as long as you are on a large enough screen! This should make navigating and linking to specific sections much easier also. The different levels are also indented. I hated how the old theme had them in a block. Overall, I am very happy on how this turned out.
Comments actually display correctly! This has also been a peeve of mine. Beaver Builder fixed them! I have a little bit of styling that I need to do with it until I am completely happy with them but it is still LOADS better than they used to be.
Conclusion
I think the site overall looks mostly how I imagined it to look when I was hacking it together. A few more tweaks here and there and I think it will be very nice and easy to use. Let me know in the comments what you think or if you see a bug or something that needs to be changed!