After last night’s recording of the WordPress Weekly (Audio below) I had an interesting conversation with Jeff about the way forward for themes.
I thought that there wasn’t a whole lot more for themes to do, beside different graphics, as most of the key website design patterns had already been produced as WordPress themes, but Jeff disagreed saying that he thought there was a lot of scope for themes that offered customisation beyond that which is possible with widgets right now. In particular he pointed out how flexible Joomla themes are.
I agree with this, to a point; this is what people want, but I don’t think it is something they should get.
Themes should be flexible to an extent, after all, you might want the blog on the home page or you might want it as a news section and have a static front page. You might want to use images, you might not. But I don’t think themes should be super flexible.
It seems to me, and feel free to contradict me if you disagree, that flexibility is not really necessary. Sidebars and widgets help to setup the blog but after that they are unnecessary. The encourage you to tinker with the site unnecessarily, and I fear that a super flexible theme would have the same result.
There are a lot of established blog patterns and provided themes can be switched into one of those, or different versions provided I see no reason to be as flexible as Joomla. Hell, I think Joomla’s flexibility is one of the most limiting features it has. It makes it hard to use and we certainly don’t want WordPress to go there!
In my view the future of themes is intelligence.
Themes are dumb. You point WordPress at the right page and spits out the information where you tell it. I don’t think this is enough any more.
I think we need to start looking for theme authors to write a lot more code to help users.
This could be code like I used on my Fun with Minimalism theme that I produced a little while back where it keeps a track of the last post the user came from and uses that to decide what kind of next post link to provide. If the user came from a category page then the theme would provide a next post link to show the next post from that category and not the next post from the entire blog.
This is a very basic function though and I think it is possible to do a lot more.
What if, if someone has performed a search then those search results cuold stay available somewhere for them to search and maybe even filter according to additional tags and categories.
What if the visitor has come from a search engine in the first place? Perhaps making available a list of your posts that match the search as well as the specific post then clicked through to.
Finally, theme authors should think about ways of modifying the content and layout to automatically determine the optimal content for visitors from various sources. Allow content to be positioned in four or five different positions and then track how often each set of content is accessed, where the visitor came from, how long they stayed etc, and modify the layout automatically to suit, or to test alternatives.
There’s a lot that themes can offer that haven’t even been thought of yet and my list is certainly some way short of the full potential. I don’t think that blind flexibility is the way though. Themers need to start thinking of ways to truly advance the art of theming and find revolutions rather then evolutions.
This episode features an interview with Jane Wells of Automattic talking about Usability and the excellent changes in WordPress 2.7 (now at Beta 1).