Saying Goodbye to Cutline

For years I’ve used a cus­tomized ver­sion of the Cut­line theme to dis­play my per­sonal blog. In its day it was very sta­ble and visu­ally ele­gant, gar­ner­ing lots of favor­able com­ments on its appear­ance.

Unfor­tu­nately, the Cut­line theme was sold years ago to an orga­ni­za­tion that did not invest in future-proof­ing it… I knew the clock was tick­ing on my con­tin­ued use of this theme, and now the alarm has gone off… My site vis­i­tors have changed, and Cut­line can’t adapt to their needs.

Thanks to Google Ana­lyt­ics, I know that increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple read my blog posts from IOS devices. Cut­line dis­plays OK on iPad tablets, but it’s an eye­strain chal­lenge on iPhones (even with a Retina dis­play).

Now that 20% of my vis­i­tors access this blog from mobile devices, it’s time to switch to a more mobile-friendly Word­Press child theme and frame­work.

Here’s a quick sum­mary of what I’ve learned while try­ing to find a replace­ment Word­Press theme — sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars and many hours later…

I’ve licensed and tried sev­eral frame­work-based themes that claim to be “respon­sive” — mean­ing, they promise to adapt grace­fully to PC/Mac browser dif­fer­ences and mobile devices of many kinds:

• Head­way Themes
• The­sis 2.0.1
• Stu­dio­Press Eleven40

Thesis

As a long-time user of The­sis 1.8 (for a com­pany web­site), I was hop­ing to move up to the new ver­sion of The­sis, which launched this Octo­ber. Unfor­tu­nately, The­sis 2.0.x is still quite embry­onic. While promis­ing, it is poorly doc­u­mented, too time-con­sum­ing for a non-devel­oper to learn — some­one for whom blog­ging is a hobby and not a way to earn a liv­ing.

The new ver­sion does not lever­age my prior expe­ri­ence with the orig­i­nal The­sis frame­work; the pric­ing model for a hob­by­ist blog­ger with sev­eral sites is unat­trac­tive. There’s no stream­lined way to upgrade a site or blog from ear­lier ver­sions of The­sis to the new one.

I played around for half a day, watched sev­eral hours of tuto­ri­als, and decided The­sis is not ready for prime time, except for adven­tur­ous devel­op­ers. Or peo­ple who will earn money help­ing oth­ers learn and adapt The­sis to their needs.

Unfor­tu­nately, my man­aged web host­ing provider has noti­fied me that our aging ver­sion of The­sis is caus­ing per­for­mance prob­lems, so we must upgrade our cor­po­rate web­site. This will force us to exam­ine our web­site plat­form strat­egy, as mov­ing up to the lat­est ver­sion of The­sis is not in the cards.

Headway Themes

I licensed Head­way’s frame­work about 6 months ago, and have poked away at it sev­eral times. Had I fallen in love with one of its child themes, I may have been will­ing to go through the learn­ing hur­dle.

But, like The­sis 2.0, there’s too much work to go from Head­way’s blank can­vas to an ele­gant theme, unless you’re a skilled devel­oper who under­stands the impli­ca­tions of Word­Press’ box model, PHP and CSS intri­ca­cies. I don’t have time to go that deep…

Last week I began exper­i­ment­ing with Stu­dio­Press. It proves to be my most prac­ti­cal option.

StudioPress & Eleven40

This blog is now man­aged using the Gen­e­sis Frame­work and Stu­dio­Press’ Eleven40 child theme. It adapts rea­son­ably grace­fully to mobile devices and tablets with smaller screens. There’s an active user-com­mu­nity sup­port forum, albeit the ques­tions and answers are quite tech­ni­cal.

While I might wish for more UI-level con­trol over the styling, this is good enough. I truly wish it had been pos­si­ble to adapt the Cut­line styling to Stu­dio­Press, but that would have required more of an invest­ment in time and/or money than I’m will­ing to make. So I’ve stuck with the Eleven40 child theme, with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the typog­ra­phy.

That said, Gen­e­sis’ lack of sup­port for a custom.css stylesheet makes me worry about future rework when Stu­dio­Press updates the theme. My changes are “hard-coded” into the child the­me’s stylesheet. This will no doubt bite me some­day in the future.

So, many hours and sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars later, this intre­pid do-it-your­selfer now has a blog that behaves grace­fully on the mobile devices that most of my read­ers use.