Personally, I have never found a theme that is 100% useable without some significant HTML+CSS customization and/or PHP/MySQL/Javascript customization. And even the best themes use approaches that result in sites that require a huge amount of time to maintain the content because the themer made easy coding choices rather than build functionality to allow managing content with less effort. Examples include using categories to group content where a custom taxonomy would be better, and a custom post would be best.
WordPress themes as they currently stand should absolutely be done away with, even though the concept of separating presentation from content is an excellent foundation.
Sepearating content from presentation might have been the original purpose of themes, but that definitely hasn’t proved to be the case in practice.
Put more succinctly, the law of unintended consequences strikes again.
As a general rule, I find that themes, (and I’m not including every theme developer or designer here, just lots of them), promise way more than they can ever deliver.
I can’t count the number of sites I’ve worked on over the years in which management of expectations with regard to what a client can do with a theme and what they can’t has played a significant role.
Add to this the complexities of customizing a theme so that it becomes accessible, (something required especially when there’s a lawsuit or demand letter or even just a desire to make the site accessible involved), and you have a recipe for more headache for the developer and the client than there should be.
There’s a reason I won’t touch anything from Theme Forest, which is admittedly the most extreme case but far from the only concentration of trashfire from a code standpoint that’s out there.
And I don’t see any of this changing until one of the least-modernized parts of WordPress, (the theme infrastructure) is gone.
If Gutenberg helps us get there, I’m all for it, even though I still think Matt should spend about three days without his mouse and monitor stuck with a screen reader and Gutenberg.
On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?
#Let’sFixThis To tell the truth, I don’t have an answer to the questions raised by Jeffrey Zeldman in Nothing Fails Like Success, but as someone who participates in the IndieWeb, and who has seen nothing but benefit from it, both personally and professionally, I have to hope that we can fix what we’ve broken. Not only that, I think we have to fix it, both because this is the only web we have, and because, really, we’re the ones who convinced the general public to use things like Twitter and Facebook and the like. We turned them onto these things, it wasn’t just marketers. I’m not suggesting that any of us should succumb to paralyzing guilt over any of this, and that includes Zuckerberg. For one thing, it’s a whole lot easier to see what’s wrong in the rear-view mirror than it is through the windshield, and for another, paralyzing built would prevent us from doing the fixing. We need to be clear-eyed when it comes to what we’re fixing, and in my opinion there’s a hell of a lot of things that need fixing.
If we have any hope of repair, I think we as designers and developers need to start with ourselves and our industry. We need to get our act together and start behaving like we’re a profession, and we need to discontinue the pervasive practice of rewarding all the wrong things. Those are just for starters, and they’re large undertakings in themselves. And once we get our own house in order, we’ll need to spend some time doing some seriously hard work convincing the genereal public that the content we convinced them to start putting in the hands of the big social media networks is in fact valuable enough to own and control. Next comes making it easier to own and control. Despite every word of criticism I’ve leveled against WordPress’s new editor, I believe Matt Mullenweg is on the right track, at least as far as the concept goes, because I believe the new editor will make it easier for the average, non-technical person to own and control their content, and at the end of the day, average non-technical people are the majority, not designers and developers.
I have to hope we can accomplish all these tasks. Otherewise, the only thing left is to burn everything to the ground. I hate to think we might be at that point. I’m still optimistic about the web, about its openness and independence, about it’s fundamental accessibility, and I’m optimistic about fixing it and making it easier for everyone to participate in the web. To that end, I hope to have at least a small part in fixing it.
After a user of the Storefront WordPress theme, (WooCommerce’s default theme), reported accessibility challenges with the theme’s focus outlines and text decoration with regard to links, the Storefront theme has been #WordPress #A11y">modified to address the issue with focus outlines by modifying the default outline so that it is darker than it was previously, as well as making the focus outlines solid. The theme will also underline links in the content, the footer, and breadcrumbs.
These changes are slated for the 2.5 release, which does not yet have a date set. However, you’ll want to keep an eye on your WordPress updates so that you can take advantage of these upcoming accessibility improvements. I’m looking at you, assistive technology sho[ps.