Rejuvenating the s.o.

So, after being hacked a few weeks ago and getting the attention of the good people at Txd, I finally got around to updating my copy of WordPress. Unsatisfied with the current slew of official and non-official themes available for WordPress “Strayhorn” v1.5.2, I decided to use Michael Heilemann’s new über-theme: K2.

Installation and upgrade were fairly innocuous. The lack of documentation (and understanding by me) for K2 did confuse me a bit, as the K2 pages over at the Bonsai state that it supports various plugins. What exactly does “support” mean? Compatibility? Well, it actually means that the appropriate plugin function calls are already wrapped in if(function_exists()) constructs. As such, all I had to do was download the plugin and upload it to my plugin directory. Clarification of the instructions in this regard would be helpful.

Beyond that, the functional details of K2 are nice: AJAX comments, separation of trackbacks/pingbacks, nice CSS out of the box, support for schemes within the K2 theme (make color/font/layout changes to CSS), admin panel configuration of theme preferences. The list goes on. I do, however, have a small gripe. As a perfectionist, I like both my front-end and back-end to be as clean as possible: semantically-correct XHTML, nicely-tabbed XHTML document source, separated JavaScript and CSS, and simple yet elegant design. K2 achieves the last, but at the expense of a clean backend. In viewing the source for my pages to aid in troubleshooting, I found it very difficult to find what I was looking for do to the disorganized state of the XHTML. The JavaScript issue probably has more to do with a deficit in the plugin architecture of WordPress than any fault of K2, but it still bothers me.

Anyway, the s.o. (blog title, anyone?) is slowly being reorganized, and it may take some time to return to normal. Your patience is appreciated.