People keep telling me that change is good. Even though my own experience says otherwise, they say that change is almost always for the better, rather than for the worse. (Realistically, bad change is terrible. Horrible, even.) They say that change is good because a lack of change leads to stagnation, which leads to a lack of innovation, which is bad.

I propose a different hypothesis: change is only good of the change itself is at least as good as, if not vastly better than, what existed before.

Which is really why I chose to change my WordPress theme.

I’ve posted about theme changes before, but it’s been quite a while since the last theme change; in the beginning I used to change themes quite frequently, every couple of months wasn’t uncommon. As soon as I settled on Grid Focus, though, it seemed that I wouldn’t change unless I saw something even more minimalistic or clean. That’s not to say I wasn’t looking, I was always on the lookout for a lore minimalistic theme, a cleaner theme. In Google Reader there’s posts that pop up every now and again that showcase what’s new in the world of WordPress themes, and almost everytime I scrolled past them, dismissing them as “too busy”, or “just not what I’m looking for.

Until, that is, I found Minblr by the guys at Themify.me, creators of Awesome WordPress Themes. (Full disclosure: those are affiliate links. Click them. Or Don’t.)

I love WordPress. Love it to death. I wouldn’t use any other publishing platform — Tumblr is simplistic and nice, but not having control of my content would really get to me. WordPress offers the power and feature set that I need, while allowing me to still be in control of whatever I write or post.

I love WordPress. Love it to death. I wouldn’t use any other publishing platform — Tumblr is simplistic and nice, but not having control of my content would really get to me. WordPress offers the power and feature set that I need, while allowing me to still be in control of whatever I write or post.

What Tumblr does offer is custom post types — photo, link, quote, or just a basic text post. Now that custom post types are in WordPress 3.1, I get the best of both worlds, and Minblr by Themify.me lets me leverage that functionality. If you visit the homepage you’ll notice that each post has a little icon next to it, which denotes what kind of post each post is.

What doesn’t work:
Video posts. Simply pasting in the URL of, say, a YouTube video doesn’t automatically embed the video, even though this sort of functionality was introduced a couple of (WordPress) versions ago. I’m doing manual embeds for now.
There’s also a little issue regarding RSS, specifically how custom post type content (images, quotes, quote attribution) doesn’t show up in the RSS feed. I’m so sorry, RSS subscribers, but for now it looks like you’ll have to click through. It’s definitely an issue with the theme, and I’ve told the devs who are working hard to fix the bug.

Those are the only two issues I’ve come across so far. Besides a serious width change that I’ll have to apply on a more permanent basis (the current way is a hack and will only persist if I don’t update the theme), I wanna do some other tweaks to the theme (for example, there’s no need to display the author/tags/number of comments for every single post, especially on the homepage).

Thanks to the new post type publishing is now a little more complex and requires doing from the “Add New” menu option inside the WordPress dashboard. Even the Press This feature I’m oh-so-fond-of lets me use custom post types, which is nothing short of awesome.

Love the new theme? Hate the new theme? Find something that doesn’t work properly? Let me know in the comments!

(You really deserve a medal if you’ve read this far. Seriously.)