archives

2006 | JulySeventh

I don’t usually write about WordPress in my posts, except maybe to release a theme, but after participating in David’s challenge and reading the responses, I finally started to think. (Yes, I rarely think before I join things. So sue me.) I came to the following conclusion: WordPress isn’t slowing down at all - not in theme, plugins, or development.

In this post, I’m going to cover themes.

When the first Theme & Plugin contest was launched, WordPress was still closer to the pound, and each new theme made a lot more waves. In the recent contests, the creators and judges were half so dedicated, and that was a big contribution to the lack of their success. However, I’m not here to berate the contests. I’m going to address David’s issue of the slowdown. Now I don’t disagree with everything he says (after all, I participated), but some of the more general ideas leave me with a furrowed brow.

It’s just that WordPress has gotten so big, each new release of anything doesn’t make as big a splash. Take a pond analogy, for example. WordPress started out as a little pond. Every pebble dropped in it was like a cannonball, and relative to the size of the pond, made as big a splash. As WordPress grew, the pond grew and changed. Now it’s more like a lake. You can’t notice every pebble dropped in a lake, and each ripple a single one makes can go unnoticed. And there are a lot of pebbles being dropped, let me assure you.

The amount of really new themes being added to the pool, seems to be shrinking every day as people rehash old ideas. Those rehashed themes lacking the same creativity and originality of the original theme creator. Are designers feeling paralyzed by something, making them hold back their ideas?

Yes. Designers are definitely paralyzed by something. The WordPress community has proven again and again to embrace the minimalist themes and ignore, or even shun, the rest - just look at some contest results over at AreaWP. No wonder designers are too afraid to just jump into the water. Instead, everyone’s toeing it, recycling ideas to see how others are going to react to theirs. There are only so many “barely-there” designed you can do, and Scott’s got a lot of them covered.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there maybe 3 idolized themes out there. Like anything turned idol, people tend to emulate it. You know what I’m talking about:

A lot of themes use the three listed above as a stepping stool. They, however, tend to fall off. I’m not saying it’s wrong or bad to base designs of the foundation of the popular themes; indeed, that’s how a lot of people learn: by modifying the work of others. Sometimes people denounce it, other times people embrace it. It all depends on who you are, what you did, when you did it, and how you did it.

But while it’s true that there are some a lot of such themes, there are also the gems people fail to really notice, which are orginal, are new, and are creatively designed, and not half bad. No one’s going to make another Kubrick. No one’s going to make another Hemingway. Why? It’s already been done.

You just have to dig a little bit deeper to see that this community is still full of life.

Well? That was maybe 10 minutes of theme browsing and some old favorites/bookmarks. Not so bad for a snail of a community, is it? There are 38 pages of themes in the theme viewer, and maybe another hundred not in there. There are gems; it just takes more time and usual to find it.

After all, we’re swimming in a lake now, not a pound.

And someday, it’ll be an ocean. Get used to it; it’s called evolution.

P.S. - And this is for those who don’t usually come to my site. For all you WordPress oriented people out there, has anyone taken a look outside of the backyard? Click these links. They’re not WordPress or professionals or in 9rules, but if you’re looking for something creatively designed, they’re some of the best I’ve seen.