You might recall a few weeks ago I wrote a post wondering if I should change the theme (in a BIG way) on my LaneBailey.com blog. I was looking REALLY hard at the Ikarus theme to replace my Shifter theme system. I had been running the Shifter theme system for around a year and a half, and was quite happy with the performance, but after seeing Ikarus, I really wanted to give it a try.
Well, I did it… I made the change.
Yep. I dived in and made the change. I think that my estimates of the time involved were pretty close. Of course, there is one thing I didn’t do… and I am still up in the air as to the direction to take.
I have been using ‘read more‘ tags on my blog for a long time. The Ikarus doesn’t need them. So, I could go back and take out the tags in old posts… but I don’t think so. Aside from it being a MASSIVE amount of work, it would be work that would have to be repeated if I changed to a theme that benefitted from ‘read more’ tags in the future. I think I might continue to use the tags on the posts so that I have more floxibility in the future.
** A ‘Read More’ tag is a little piece of code that allows the front page to have an intro to the post displayed so that when it is clicked, it links to the whole post.**
I made the other change, too…
As I said, I think that Shifter is a GREAT theme system. I had been wanting to play with the ‘Portal’ option on it for a while. So, I chose to re-deploy that theme on another of our WordPress sites, BaileyServices.com. I am certainly not close to finishing that site, the plan is to more fully populate it with content and play with the different options for Shifter.
For those that remember how LaneBailey.com looked while running Shifter, you might notice that it looks complately different on BaileyServices. That is one of the strengths of the Shifter system. It allows a lof of options to change the look of the site without having to dive into code or re-arrange widgets and such. Usually, themes might have slightly different orientations, and so widgets might have to be tweaked when the theme is changed.
End notes
There is still some work to do with Ikarus. To start with, I am working on a way to rotate the header image randomly on each load. Also, I have a javascript conflict which prevents me from having the block with the video/tags/recent posts AND a mortgage calculator. I need to figure out how to resolve that conflict…
Finally, and only a little related, LaneBailey.info will be my social networking hub, maintaining links and info about all of my current social networking. It will also eventually have all of my technology related posts in one place. I am testing another theme on it that I think might be applicable to my property blogsites. The best way to test it and see what it can do is to toss it out in a production environment… where it still isn’t crucial, but where issues will show up. Basically, I want to see if there are ways to re-skin it to look differently for different properties.
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