It took about 2 hours of tinkering, but the weblog has now moved over to the Twenty Twenty-Five theme. I’ll deliver a true one sentence bottom line on top (BLOT) for this one. The new weblog deployment didn’t go well. Full stop. That was one sentence. We reached a minimum viable product (MVP) so I deployed the new site and we are absolutely live online with it right now in the wild. We did not reach the 80% completed threshold before that deployment. We shipped at the minimal functional level. I was able to redo a functional header, but the overall design is terrible. It’s got really large buttons and a terrible headshot photo as a part of it. The footer is probably the most complete part of the new design; it at least is not embarrassing. Most of the real problems are in the body components that sit between the header and footer. I need a solid build and setup for two different types of pages that include a regular page format for static content and the weblog page that includes the last 10 posts. 

Currently we have the standard out of the box Twenty Twenty-Five theme setup for both the pages and the weblog. I’m going to have to learn how to better utilize Gutenberg to improve the actual content display and setup. The days of just picking a weblog theme and happily deploying a website are apparently over. Even a basic deployment now requires a fair amount of effort to deploy something awesome. This whole conversion process made me a little bit disappointed. It was not a wholesale good experience. Even after watching a few YouTube videos with people showing tips and tricks was not enough to battle the initial barriers to quality deployment. I’m probably going to end up investing 10-12 more hours into finishing and refining the overall setup. 

I have been reading a bunch of articles about the drama surrounding WordPress recently. Before I made the switch to WordPress deployments I had used the Six Apart product Movable Type for several years. I’ll be curious to see what happens when the drama and overall swirl related to WordPress comes to an end. Making a switch to a new system could be interesting. Sometimes I miss just using and publishing with Microsoft FrontPage which oddly was the most satisfying web deployment experience that I ever had as a website developer. 

Quick update: It’s now the second half of the Kansas City Chiefs game and I have finished tinkering with the weblog deployment of the new Twenty Twenty-Five theme. It took a few hours of graphical user interface work in WordPress to get the deployment into something that works well enough. I realized right after finishing my efforts that no native theme export exists to make a backup. You have to backup via the backend apparently.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado