Switching Themes: Let us Pray
When Dead Rooster was born, I literally spent a week finding the perfect theme. I knew what I wanted and it was only a matter of time before I found it. Finally, I found Daleri Selection by Andreas Viklund and it was EXACTLY what I was looking for.
I love this theme!
The problem, though, was that Andreas decided to stop supporting it (even though he personally uses it for his own blog), so after MANY WordPress upgrades, the theme became incompatible with more and more plugins and widgets.
Since there was no other theme on the market that would replace the look and feel to my satisfaction, I began tweaking the code of the original to work with the current WordPress upgrades. THIS IS A GIGANTIC MISTAKE!
I want to alert everyone out there that by tweaking your theme’s code to “work” with current WordPress upgrades, you could be setting yourself up for serious problems in the future. Namely, when you finally do switch themes (and, you eventually will), your new theme will not carry over the tweaks you made to make things work and your blog could blow up when you switch.
I’m no CSS programmer, so I didn’t really have the skills to go with a custom.css file. At least THEN I would’ve had all my tweaks in one place so I could deal with each one when switching over. As it was, my tweaks are spread throughout my original theme’s various .php files (I’m such an IDIOT!).
I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I switch, but I’m assuming there will be quite a few problems. I know FOR SURE of one problem: my images will ALL be misaligned when I switch. I’ve had to tweak the image code WordPress creates when you add an image. I’ve had to do it on nearly every post; so, I know I’ll have to deal with that. Luckily, it will only be time consuming and some posts may look funny for a while, but, at least it’s not something I don’t know how to fix.
And, then there’s the comment section. I’ve had to really tweak the shit out of that to get it to work with threaded comments—I still never got it to work with gravatars. Yup, I think I’m most nervous about my comments. We’ll see.
Anyhow, I’m really excited about the new theme. It’s a commercial theme which I intend to write about in a future post because you won’t believe all the cool things you can do with it. It’s amazing!
At first, I adjusted the settings to look almost IDENTICAL to my old Daleri Selection theme, but then I thought: why not improve the look a little bit? Make it cleaner?
So, in the next few days, expect to see a mildly different look for Dead Rooster (or, maybe by the time you read this, it has already happened!).
This being the final post with the old theme, lets document the original look of Dead Rooster:
Goodbye old theme, I’ll miss you!
Wish me luck, everyone.
Here goes…
Dead Rooster is the online home of 
Best of luck with your new theme. I like this. Let me know If at any time you decide to get a custom wordpress theme done for your site.
Cheers!!
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William McCamment
reply on September 12th, 2009 11:07 am:
I just checked out your blog and portfolio. You do great work! I’ll definitely keep you in mind.
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Good luck! You are a brave man.
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William McCamment
reply on September 12th, 2009 2:20 pm:
Thanks! You are a fuzzy kitty! LOL
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Wow. That was a radical change!
You, my friend, are a LIBERAL, and I applaud you for it. 
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William McCamment
reply on September 12th, 2009 6:09 pm:
Hey, I wrote it would be a “mild” difference. I’m a mild RADICAL!
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DO it already LOL
Anyway this was a great theme while it lasted 
I’m just waiting till I’m famous to BUST OUT with my ultimate theme
it may be a while tho
PS I’m inching towards a thesis purchase
Can’t wait to see the new and improved DEADROOSTER
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William McCamment
reply on September 12th, 2009 6:13 pm:
I’m getting there, buddy! I looked at Thesis; it’s a good theme. I considered it myself, but I wanted to get as close as possible to my old theme, so I went with this one. I’m going to write about it soon. It’s AMAZING the stuff you can do behind the scenes. I COULD have made it look precisely like my old theme. Unreal.
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I’m scared to tweak anything on my site. I added another column once and lost the whole thing. Luckily I saved before I made the change and recovered it but for a moment I thought I was having a heart attack. Good luck.
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William McCamment
reply on September 13th, 2009 11:50 am:
Thanks, Jen!
I have made the switch and had a few glitches (like my blogroll page went blank), but so far I’ve fixed everything. I’m sure there will be a few more things I haven’t noticed yet.
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My favorite thing about the new setup is the switch of putting the comments link at the end, instead of the top. For usability purposes, it’s much easier.
Plus, it does look cleaner. Doing a back-and-forth comparison, I’m really not sure just WHY… but it does.
Congrats to you, Rooster!
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William McCamment
reply on September 14th, 2009 9:07 am:
Thanks, Jenn!
I really like this theme! I know you’re on the Blogger platform, but I still think you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that I’m finally able to use the “visual” editor in WordPress instead of having to use the HTML editor (there are similar options in Blogger).
There were a LOT of problems with my old theme that made it a real chore to write a post. With this new one I can concentrate on writing instead of “coding.” Maybe now I’ll be more consistent with my blog updates.
I worked really hard trying to get my old theme to display readers avatars in the comment section, but could never get it to work. Now it works!
By the way, if you want a global avatar that will appear in thousands of places on the net (including my blog), go to gravatar.com and upload a photo.
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I know it’s heresy for me to comment since I use Blogger and am therefore subhuman in the eyes of Wordpress users…but I went through this when my sister-in-law tweaked my template. I could no longer update anything and had to revert to the old template. She spent so many hours working on it, I don’t know how our relationship survived. I’m lucky she’s so cool.
I like your new look but I’m not sure what changed. Did you have two rows on the right side before? It looks very neat.
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William McCamment
reply on September 14th, 2009 7:25 pm:
Thanks!
It is VERY similar to my old theme. Same sidebar and everything. Just what I wanted.
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