Finalising the theme for this blog
It’s almost the end of January 2021, and I decided to settle for the Generate press theme, using one of their standard templates. Here are some of my reasons for doing so.
- I have subscribed the to the multi site license for generatepress, which was literally lying idle for the past couple of months.
- I am getting speed test results of around, 95 plus for mobile and 99 ish for desktop with this setup. With further optimization, this site would definitely rank among the fastest.
- This process allowed me an opportunity to explore and optimize this as per my requirements.
Opportunities to improve
Initial server time response can be better there are still some dangling scripts or two that are slowing the site down, and many of the images that can be further optimized. But it’s very exciting to see that I was able to achieve these scores using this theme.
It’s been a bit of a journey – I may stick to this current configuration for some time. I may still make two or three changes to the layout, certainly the colours. Secondly, on the scripts to optimize the loading times. Finally, around, end of March,I may move the server itself as the current subscription for PHP Friends comes to a close. With that, this brings an end to this whole series of experimentation around look and feel. for this website.
Lessons learnt
I tried out several themes, majority of them are quite popular on the wordpress theme site and have hundreds of thousands of installs. The reason for going with the more popular themes are several.
a. Many of them offer a free version, to try out the look and feel.
b. My past experience with Nanica and Atticus themes was not very positive. These are themes with a small install base, and are not updated at the time of publishing.once the subscription ended. There was very little way of getting any support once the subscription ended.
c. The popular themes are regularly updated, they are compliant with Pagebuilders and Gutenberg.
d. One is more likely to find some tutorial, Frequently Asked Questions, more easily than the less popular themes.
Not trying too Hard
One of the advantages of using the WordPress themes is the level of customization one can create. But my intention was to use as much of the stock features as possible. Since I had an up and running site with multiple posts (over 120 blog posts as on today!) there were a set of quirks with each theme.
For example, Blocksy theme, I encountered three slender columns, which refused to change no matter what option I tried. One can always change these settings by modifying the scripts, however, that was not my intention, or objective.
Themes like the Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve worked well, but they displayed each blog posts in its entirety. The posts can be of course truncated, using a plugin or a script or adding a page break/ “read more’ button after every after introduction paragraph in every blog post.Again, that was not my intention, I did not want to. customize or add too many options. And finally, in case of generatepress itself, image sizes were ridiculously high. So I had to manually set them to medium large for the blog post. I like the grid pattern. And that is what I went with.
I opted for GeneratePress theme. However, the stock install was hardly satisfactory.GeneratePress Premium offered some templates that I customized to my taste.
This post was updated on 2023-02-09
July 2022
A short update: I am back into the blogging groove, but before that I had to complete a long pending update on this site. Many things needed tweaking, and I thought that a new, simpler, cleaner look was much needed. So here we are: Twenty Twentyone theme of WordPress, with Twentig Plugin. Back to Neve Pro theme.
The end of May is approaching and I have not published any new post for over two months now. Which does not mean I have NOT been writing- quite the contrary. But more on that later. Thanks for all the visits, comments and feedback in the meantime!
Today I wanted to post a few random updates:
I updated WordPress to WP6.0. A bit risky, considering it is still new and all- but Also fixed a few glitches along the way. For example, the feature images were not displaying on the homepage. I’ve disabled Shortpixel Adaptive Images plugin for now- and images are showing fine. Some deep dive required to fix that issue. Probably next weekend once I am back at home.
I’ve been away from home for second half of May, but starting June 6th, planning to publish a daily post. More on that later. (Did not happen due to a family emergency)
January 2021 Update
Website Updates- Back to WordPress and way forward
You will hear sounds in the background as the coffee was getting ready!
Background: a Website is a Sum of Moving Parts
There are many parts in a website, and WordPress is no exception. First, we have the server where the site is hosted. Most servers run on Linux, the site which hosts blog runs on Cloud Linux. The Web server can be Nginx, Apache or Litespeed. The last has become quite popular in recent years. Next, there is a control panel : either cPanel or DirectAdmin or Plesk. These are the most common control panels in use. Next is a database, typically mysql. Finally, we have a programming language called PHP. WordPress itself requires a web server, a database, PHP to run (you may be familiar with LEMP or LAMP stacks).The story does not end there. WordPress has a theme for displaying the content, and plugins for enhancing site’s functionality. The latter also have versions!
Different Softwares, Different versions govern choice of Content Management System
The challenge with having multiple components is that one has to deal with different versions of the software. Of the above, if we exclude the operating system, version of mysql, etc; we still have some control on some of the parts). For sake of simplicity, we will consider a shared hosting environment. Incidentally, this blog runs on a shared hosting server. The main site amarvyas.in runs off a standalone VPS or Virtual Private Server.
The most critical decision point: which version of PHP and WordPress to use? Other criteria like which themes and plugins to use are largely governed by the PHP and WordPress version. Case in point: many themes may not support older versions of PHP or WordPress.
Choosing the version of PHP or WordPress may not be easy
Most shared hosting providers offer WordPress beyond versions 5.5 (ideally, version 5.7.x, 5.8.x or 5.9). You have a choice to select the version of PHP – most providers offer atleast version 7.4, some also have updated to version 8 or even 8.1 of PHP.
This site ran on ClassicPress till last weekend. ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress, and ideally the CMS of my choice. But while the server which hosts this site supports PHP 8, ClassiPress had version 1.3.1, which does not run well on PHP8. I was forced to choose PHP 7.4. This limited my ability to use certain themes and plugins. Neve theme for WordPress is one such example. Some plugins for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and images optimization were also not compatible with ClassicPress. For the blog, while I missed using Neve theme, I was able to use the Hemingway theme,. The latter is beautiful theme that was updated recently in January 2022. While there were some limitations, there were also some advantages. Till the above issue surfaced.
Notes:
*I am excluding the operating system and the database versions because they are mostly determined by the web hosts.
**Many providers still offer PHP 5.6, which has long reached its end of life. Discussing the merits and utility of PHP 5.6 to versions 7.3 is a topic for another day. Software providers like Zend will provide paid commercial long term support for these versions.