stevenclark.com.au

Do you remember the taste of your mother’s biscuits when you were ten? Well that’s the same association developers have with our code and the templates we build. We nurture the neural connections that bring an otherwise complex document of tags, links and information associations into an easily recognisable whole that we call home. If not home then some word that means much the same personal belonging, kind of like recognising our own jeans in a pile of identical jeans. Our brains simply connect the dots.

Over the last month I’ve done several pieces of work where I’ve been asked to look at adjusting free templates (in this case WordPress Themes) to help a friend in need. The premise on their part of course is that free themes would be a less intrusive job for me on my holidays than getting a ground-up rebuild. In fact I’d considered these requests as an easy alternative, too. Oh that will just take me an hour and I’ll schedule it in for tomorrow morning after I walk the dog. A lesson learned hard is a lesson learned well…

The truth, especially with free templates, is that quality in the code is practically non-existent. Semantics are science fiction. You have to remember that nobody is holding a bar up to measure the quality of free (you get what you pay for I guess) and what starts as a small edit turns someone even slightly concerned with the quality of templates into a complete industrial coding frenzy! Seriously, how could I not rewrite and rebuild and buff and polish? Its also tempting to send the fixes back to the template owners with a few notes on how to improve. You have to realise that often people making free templates might be learning very early in the game, too. Or just plain pushed for time and have hacked something older, with its inherent errors and misjudgements, into something new and just as broken.

And that’s the heart of it. Other people’s templates aren’t our own and don’t have our stamp of personal recognition. They’re unfamiliar and more time consuming to play around with the code. They’re harder to navigate and lack the milestones we’d recognise that give us bearings. In this case the issue happened to be free templates but they could have easily been handed over from a back end developer for a good old front end spit and polish. In the end writing from the ground up, or at least from my own templates written from the ground up, seem to be faster and less painless. Starting from vanilla is looking like the only way to go in future regardless of time or laziness or inconvenience on day one. Ultimately doing it right is more efficient.

Now, all that being said, this blog is a great example of a bloated fat stylesheet of erroneous noise. Convoluted. Spaghetti madness. Unmaintainable. Here’s how it went – grab one Default Template on a very busy day and hack a fast interface and go to bed. Finally, promise yourself you’ll write a real one from vanilla to original awesomeness as soon as time permits. Problem solved. Only its not solved, it never gets done, and I really need to get in and rebuild this blog from vanilla over the next week sometime. So it may sound hypocritical that I point out the difficulty of working with crappy templates when my own site templates are rubbish hacks but isn’t that the way of things… cleaners don’t clean at home, builders never get around to fixing that hole in the fence.

I’m aware of the problem and working on it I guess… are you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.