Themes

• 16 August 2018
• tinkering

Sigh. I am wrestling with a few problems here, which have me a bit stymied. The theme you currently see^[1] is a child theme of Independent Publisher 2, which is a WordPress.com fork of Independent Publisher, originally developed by Raam Dev. The thing I like about the entire Independent Publisher family is the extent to which it allows focus on the text; it’s typographically clean and engaging, and pretty flexible overall.

Except for a couple of things. The original Independent Publisher doesn’t support a full-width cover image — not a deal-breaker, but I’ve grown a little attached to the one I’m using here. And its single-column layout winds up looking pretty odd on individual post pages. Independent Publisher 2 takes care of both of those issues, and adds a range of other functionality.^[2]

But Independent Publisher 2 doesn’t really support post formats, which Independent Publisher does quite well. I’ve managed to do a bit of tinkering with my child theme’s functions.php in order to approximate post format support, which is necessary to my micro.blog integration, but I’m running into oddities that make clear how partial that support is. For instance: if I use the post date to automatically create a title for my Asides,^[3] those titles appear on the posts, which, if the posts were really being treated as Asides, they wouldn’t.

So I have a few options:

1. Figure out how to hack Independent Publisher to support the full-width header image I want.
2. Figure out how to hack Independent Publisher 2 to fully support post formats.
3. Find a new theme that actually does all the things that I want it to do, and looks the way that I want it to look.^[4]

I’d be happy to receive your suggestions!

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