What is the perfect blog theme? I’ve been thinking about it and I think I have the answer.

For the blogger: The perfect blog theme disappears into the background and doesn’t hinder their writing in any way—in fact, it encourages it.

For the reader: The perfect blog theme disappears into the background and doesn’t hinder their reading in any way—in fact, it encourages it.

Please note what I haven’t included in my answer. It’s important.

Know of any publicly released themes that fit my criteria? I’d really like to know about them. Let me know if you’ve found them, or just let me know your thoughts on the perfect blog theme by leaving a comment.

And don’t be afraid to argue! I’ve been known to be wrong!

One of the cooler ideas for a new WordPress default Theme that’s come up has been the idea of including a not-so-blog-ish custom home page template with the Theme. Something optional that you could use if wanted your home page to look a little different. Maybe more of a traditional web site look (whatever that is) or a magazine look. Simply create a new page, assign this custom template to it, set it as your home page, and boom! New look.

I thought this was a great idea too. Especially if that custom page template was totally widgetized. Load up whatever dynamic content you want there with the Query Posts Widget or just use Text Widgets. The default styles of the new 2010 Theme can decide which of several widget areas is the ‘featured’ area and if you want something different—without wanting to change the markup—you can move things around with a Child Theme.

Great, right? Wrong.

You’d have to register new widget areas. Widget areas that would be confusingly unavailable if you weren’t using the custom home page template. Unless …

Here’s a really nifty function written up by Chris Gossmann that’ll check to see if a particular custom page template is active. Chris had to write a SQL query to get this to work so be thankful that he survived to tell us about it.

function is_pagetemplate_active($pagetemplate = '') {
	global $wpdb;
	$sql = "select meta_key from $wpdb->postmeta where meta_key like '_wp_page_template' and meta_value like '" . $pagetemplate . "'";
	$result = $wpdb->query($sql);
	if ($result) {
		return TRUE;
	} else {
		return FALSE;
	}
} // is_pagetemplate_active()

OK. Even by itself that function is kinda cool. There’s a few neat things you can do with it. Here’s one. Combine it with the following code for registering a new sidebar in the functions.php file of your WordPress Theme:

function test_template_widgets_init() {     
	if(is_pagetemplate_active('template-active.php')) {
               
		register_sidebar( array (
			'name' => 'Test Widget Area',
			'id' => 'test-widget-area',
			'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget-container %2$s">',
			'after_widget' => "</li>",
			'before_title' => '<h3 class="widget-title">',
			'after_title' => '</h3>',
		) );
	
	} // end test for active template
} // test_template_widgets_init()
add_action ( 'init' , 'test_template_widgets_init' );

Can you guess what that does? Using our new conditional function, is_pagetemplate_active(), we’re registering a new widget area only if, in this case, template-active.php is being used by one of our pages. Completely bypassing our earlier problem of widget areas potentially hanging around without a page for them to be displayed on.

What do you think? Pretty cool, huh? I see lots of really neat possibilities here for custom page templates in WordPress Themes and in Child Themes.

The post Build WordPress Sites Fast With the Thematic Theme Framework by Es Developed is a great resource for anyone wanting to get started with the Thematic Theme. It lists over 40 resources and tutorials that’ll get you where you want to be with rapid WordPress Theme development.

And there’s some great explanation behind why you’d want to use the Thematic Theme. Under the heading Don’t Touch That Theme:

To create your theme, you don’t actually edit any of Thematic’s theme files. Instead, you make changes using a separate child theme.

It’s really powerful since you’re not actually touching any part of Thematic. You just get a nice starting place, without worries about future Thematic updates overwriting your code edits.

You don’t have to rewrite a bunch of code all over again–you’re just adding the bits that you want to be different. This works very much like the custom styles on WordPress.com hosted blogs.

Make sure you check out Build WordPress Sites Fast With the Thematic Theme Framework.