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Migrating a WordPress Blog

November 6, 2012 •

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).

ipad_photo

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.

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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