Kubrick was actually the jump point for me to finally “getting” the layout/theme thing. I’ve been playing with WP before, but have always stumbled at the Classic theme and given up and gone back to the old familiar MT. Seeing Kubrick made something click for me and I’m slowly working my way through making it my own.
Kubrick is much nicer looking than ‘Classic’, especially if you don’t have the time to play with layout or you want to spend that time adding content (gosh!). On the other hand, I hate the way that Kubrick uses a large header graphic instead of some clever div layering and that it uses an image file to give the menu its shaded background. I’m a bit of a CSS die-hard, you see. When I have the time, I plan on making a simple but attractive theme for WP that isn’t so graphically reliant.
I think Kubrick is a great theme for those people who just want a nice looking blog without any extras. Great default theme IMO. I do recall going into the presentation tab and seeing the classic theme there. Not my cup of tea though……… 😛
moshu – there are three things in life:
1) Those within our circle of concern and the circle of influence
2) Those within our circle of concern, but not within the circle of influence
3) Those that are niether within the circle of concern or influence.
I’ll admit, I’m not too keen on the Lubrick-derivitive (for those who remember, what ships is not truly Kubrick, but something that was derived from it) being the default. I have no problems with sending it out as an *option* but to set it as the default I think is a little much to expect. People have a tendency to want to take what is the default and modify it from there. Personaly, I think “classic” (or some better form of it) should have shipped as the default, with the son-of-Kubrick as an alternative.
Kubrick is difficult to modify. I’ve done it, and I see more and more threads every day on “where is this?” or “where does that go?” or “WTF is XYZ?” When it comes to Kubrick, either you get it, or you don’t. It seems to be a 50-50 split, so what are you gonna do? For me personally, I’ve found it’s easier to build my own templates from scratch rather than try to modify someone else’s.
Tg
As the original poster revisiting this thread, I think a lot of my frustration comes from the moving target aspect of element names.
That is, just as there is an API for plugin development, I personally believe a well-known and consistent theme needs to be developed that uses a thought out and extensive set of CSS elements which are named sanely and have descriptive comments.
What I see, instead, are three options: 1) Use someone else’s theme as-is 2) Use someone else’s theme as a starting point (VERY common) 3) Roll your entire own theme from scratch.
Option 2 would be well-served by theme developers, or at least ONE theme developer, treating their theme as source code that needs to be well-understood by thousands of people instead of treating it as for their eyes only with an “I can’t be bothered to spend another 1 hour on this to make it 90% more usable by people”. That theme developer would have to know WP guts very well and try to be as comprehensive as possible. I routinely find many half-complete stylesheets that do not even stub in all of the WP-provided elements available for tweaking.
I understand VERY well that this is all volunteer work and contributions from enthusiasts. If I were a CSS guru who already had his fingers flipping through the WP code, I’d have done this already and offered it. Unfortunately, I am far far from it. I’m just a guy who sees room for improvement, and that’s all I am proposing.
Guys – we have been here before – and it wasnt pretty believe me.
kickslop if you like the simplicity and elegance of Classic but in a more convenient two column and footer format you might want to look at the Gemini interface available from thebombsite as used for example by the folks at National Terror Alert among others.
@tg: Have you read “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”? 😉
