Seth Godin should need no introduction to anyone on the web. What might need introduction is his new venture called the Domino Project, in which he’s partnering with Amazon to rethink the fatally flawed current publishing model. And, to get it up and running, he’s running WordPress and a lightly tweaked version of The Erudite. Fun to see it used on a high-profile site!
HT Rick from Stylesheeter
At long last: a new release of The Erudite that isn’t only available on my site, but also on the WordPress.org theme directory. As I previously wrote, this has been a massive pain in the ass due to the new theme requirements. 2.7.7 introduces an option for page comments, which are on by default in WP, but off by default in my theme because pages should not have them. It also added a Spanish translation thanks to Juanjo.
If you only upgrade through the WP admin panel, you can check the changelog on the project page to see what’s changed since 2.7.2 (the last release approved on the theme directory).
I tweeted a while ago about my mixed feelings about the new WordPress.org theme requirements. They’ve already bitten me on the release of The Erudite 2.7.4, which was not approved by the theme directory folks for failing to meet a number of requirements.
High standards are a great thing. Overall I think that the theme team has done a good job with that document. But jeez, reading it makes me tired — it keeps going and going. It creates a massive load for theme developers and theme reviewers. It sure would be nice if the a lot of the items on the required list were on the recommended list.
Here’s a specific one: requiring the use of comment_form() is dumb. It was only introduced in 3.0, while my theme should currently be backwards compatible with 2.7 (with some degradation). Sure, comment_form() is a great function, and if I were writing The Erudite again, I’d use it. But requiring it? Dumb. Some numbers to back that up: as of right now, only 39.8% of WP users are on 3.0.
And what about an interesting theme like Quality Control? Something tells me it fails on a number of requirements simply due to it not being a blog, but it was approved after the new requirements were in place. It must have been approved because it’s a cool use of WP despite the requirements.
But my biggest problem here is that the bar to participation in the WP community is being raised too high. If I were starting to write this theme again, I would take one look at the requirements and look for some other way to spend my time. This is not the way for a community to welcome new participants.
What I’m saying is that we need to embrace amateurism in the WordPress community. You don’t get to be a professional without being an amateur first, and the new guidelines just might prevent a whole lot of folks from bothering to start that journey. I understand that the WP community is trying to act like an adult these days, which is great. But let’s not lose that sense of discovery and exploration that allowed us to get started in the first place.
Finally, as a practical consideration, perhaps we could add a “blessed” (i.e. meets recommended requirements) flag to the themes repo. Themes that do so are implicitly more trustworthy, and will be promoted more heavily on the repo. This allows amateurs to get their theme out to a wider audience, while not having a “blessed” status clearly reveals that these amateur themes might not contain all the functionality that a “blessed” theme has.
The Erudite 2.7.4 has been released. I made some typography tweaks, cleaned up some code, and added 4(!) new translations: Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, German and Russian. As always, the theme is available on the project page while the gears grind slowly over at the WP Repo.
When Tim Brown released v2 of the Web Font Specimen (WFS) a few weeks back, he honoured me by asking for my feedback a couple of days before releasing it to the world. I had a couple of suggestions that he took into consideration but ultimately decided to leave aside. Since he licensed WFS with Creative Commons, I decided to make my own variant using my initial suggestions.
The three changes I’ve made are fairly small and revolve around the Body Size Comparison section of four fonts. I’ve substituted Verdana for Tim’s choice of Times New Roman, as Times is rarely used on the web. Verdana, on the other hand, is probably the most widely used and most readable web font of all.
To further aid in this comparison, I’ve shifted the specimen’s font to the right one position. It now has Georgia on its left, and Verdana on its right, with Arial taking the far right position. This way, whether you’re testing a serif or sans within WFS, your font is always adjacent to both its style mate and complement for easy compare and contrast.
Finally, I’ve added a paragraph set in each of the four fonts beneath the comparison section. The whole point of evaluating web type is to ensure that it is legible, suitable—and don’t forget beautiful—when set in the browser. Now you can compare how well your font works in paragraph form against these three web stalwarts.
And, just as you can use FontFriend with the WFS, you can use it with the Soma WFS.
Enough with the chit-chat. View the orignal. View the Soma WFS. Or, grab the Soma Web Font Specimen zip. Go make beautiful type on the web.