The One Week Redesign

Why another redesign?

Two reasons really, firstly I can’t help myself, I just always have this need to change something. Secondly, I needed to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 and I wanted to make sure I could make use of all the new features it brings, this meant I either had to update large portions of my existing theme, or build a new one. Oh, and did I mention that I only started work on this design on December 23^rd, so really its the “less than one week” redesign.

What’s different?

The basics of the site haven’t changed very much at all, I’ve just rearranged things a bit, and gone crazy with some fancy CSS in areas like the post excerpts (CSS dropcaps FTW). The layouts of the reviews, archives and downloads pages remain largely untouched (because I was actually happy with how they looked). The single post view has received a bit of a revamp, with the excerpt added, a revised sidebar and updated comments display that makes use of the threaded comments functionality built in to WP2.7.

I’ve also made a bunch of changes, big and small, to the code behind some of the custom pages in an effort to further speed things up because I’ve noticed the site has been a bit sluggish of late. One of the biggest changes was to my archives page which was using a massive 140+ queries each time it was rebuilt (omgwtfbbq). The cause? I was using the WordPress comments_popup_link() function to display the number of comments on each post, this was using (and I don’t know exactly why, an extra query for every post listed. The solution? I replaced it with my own bit of code that uses the comment number that has already been returned. Same result, 140 less queries.

The Best Bits

So far, my favourite thing is the threaded comments, its allowed me to ditch a couple of plugins that I was using, and although I now need to go through and cleanup some of the comments, I think its going to be great once people start using it. My other favourite feature is actually one regular users won’t see (I’ll post a screenshot later to show you what I’m talking about), and its a “quick post” interface that I’ve built right into the front end of my theme. I can use it to quickly and easily post articles (like I’m doing now), sidenotes, images, links, reviews etc all without having to go into the WordPres admin area (think tumblr etc.). The hope is that it will encourage me to post more often, only time will tell if it works or not.

Let me know what you think of the refresh, and please let me know if you see anything that looks broken and busted, because there is a good chance I missed something. Some posts might look a bit weird for a few days, but I’ll work through and sort that out over the next week or so.

One last thing

Make sure you drop by between 8pm December 31^st, and 3am January 1^st for the fireworks.…