Seth Godin Chooses The Erudite

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

The Erudite 2.7.7 Released

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).

WordPress.org Theme Requirements Are a Drag

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 Released

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.

Soma Web Font Specimen

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 [Down­load not found] zip. Go make beau­ti­ful type on the web.