Well, I’ve updated my install of WordPress, and the various plugins I use. I also updated my Media Temple server from MySQL 4 to 5 – which will be necessary for WordPress 3.2, as they’re dropping support for MySQL 4. I still have some tweaking to do, but things are much more up to date now than they have been in a while.
Since I’m starting things up again around here, I decided it was time for a fresh theme too. For now I decided to stick with a slightly modified version of Twenty Ten (the new default theme in WordPress). I’ve been saying for ever that I would create my own custom theme for the site, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I hope to do that early next year.
Before I decided to stick with Twenty Ten, I actually looked around quite a lot for themes by others. I hate to say it, but I was a little disappointed by what I found.
There are literally thousands of WordPress themes out there. While there’s definitely some good ones, there’s also a tremendous amount of junk. All I was looking for was a simple, clean, modern theme… and I couldn’t really find what I wanted. Everything I found was either too much or too little in terms of design and features. Or, they were just plain ugly.
There’s a huge number of pay-theme premium sites out there these days. And, I was totally willing to buy a theme that I liked, but these sites seem to cater to themes with a more “magazine” type layout. I don’t really want that right now. I was looking for a more traditional, one post after another, type theme.
As wordpress has developed from strictly a blogging platform to much more of a full-featured CMS (content management system), it seems like traditional blog themes have kind of fallen behind. From what I’ve seen, it seems like the people who are really putting thought and time into the themes they’re developing, are only creating magazine (or portfolio / business) themes. It doesn’t seem like the same level of effort is being put into simpler themes anymore.
It’s possible this is just my perception of the situation, so feel free to leave links in the comments if there are some good, simple themes that you know of.