My last blog post was back in July. I was not able to keep my usual rate of a new blog post every two weeks. This had many different reasons, some personal and some regarding people I care about. But one other reason was the slow pace on getting my new theme ready enough. And today I have to say: stop!

I used the demo content I usually use to design a theme and tried to replicate every little element “as pixel perfect as possible”. But since I’m now at ~900 lines of custom CSS code, and this would prevent people from overwriting styles in the Site Editor, this approach is not going to be a good one.

How to continue with this project?

As my main goals were to create a theme that is usable by as many users of the original Waipoua theme as possible, with as few “migration steps” as possible, I have to realize that it’s simple not feasible. I always knew that I would also need to offer a “companion plugin” as well, preserving all the shortcodes Waipoua was offering. But is that really worth it? How many users are there still who use Waipoua and who would be brave enough to migrate?

Option 1: Offering two different versions of my theme

My first thought, even some time ago, was to offer two variants of my theme. One that would try to be almost “pixel perfect” not breaking the styles of elements on existing sites. And one that would leverage the Site Editor to its fullest, by only adding styles through the Site Editor using the theme.json file.

In this approach, the first variant would load this ~900 lines of CSS file, the second one would only load one, that is necessary to style the header with the search. Or it would not try to replicate the search exactly how it is, and instead just offers a different search in the header.

Option 2: Taking this as a learning opportunity and move on

This project was really fun! But it was also very frustrating at times. One main thing I learned from it: writing a great theme is not easy! And my respect for the work of Ellen and Manuel grew with every hour I’ve tried to replicate their work.

Going forward

I still plan to create a new theme that would look similar enough to Waipoua, so people would recognize my page, and maybe not even realize it is a different theme. If you don’t compare the new and old version side by side, and just look and the colors, fonts and structure, you will probably just think there were some minor changes in the current theme.

I really don’t like the idea to add any custom CSS to my very first theme, that cannot be overwritten in the Site Editor by any user. And I would also like to not force users to use a companion plugin to make it work with their current content. I am one of these users myself, since I have used some shortcode in old blog posts, as there was no Block Editor around that would allow you to create “buttons” or columns in the text.

Help me with your feedback!

I often ask in my blog posts for comments, and most of the time I don’t get any. But this time I would really appreciate your feedback. Even more if you use Waipoua on one of your site. What would you like me to do? Create a theme with two variants (Option 1)? Or just try to create a real Block Theme that would not try to “support legacy content” (Option 2)?