A lick of paint

I’m a big fan of the Revolution range of themes by Brian Gardner and as you may have noticed if you’re reading this at upyourego.com – I’ve implemented a new one.

My last theme, that I had for a pretty long time in comparison to other themes – was the revolution magazine theme and, although radically different to most blog templates, at heart and in function, was still pretty much a blog template.

The layout was still extremely linear with the most recent post appearing on the top left, the second most recent underneath it and a list of the next ten most recent underneath that.

OK so there was a lot more going on across the homepage – but again – these were just linear posts with the top box just a list of the most recent five offset by three.

This new theme is the Pro Media one and allows me to move UpYourEgo further away from the traditional blog look and feel.

It still uses WordPress under the hood but with a massive haul of plugins, a bit of code tweakery and a very clever template to give it the feel of an online magazine site.

There are still a few things I want to tweak and change around and more customisations I need to do around the individual post template – but as a whole it is pretty much in place.

However – there are more time overheads to a template like this.

Under a normal blog template you just need to fill in a title and the post and then click publish – that gives you everything you need to get the story out. You COULD even get away without the title – basically just write something in a box and go.

Obviously if you wanted to stand a better chance of having your post read, getting a ranking on Google or even share the link love – you’d need to do a little more than write a few words in a box.

You’d want to fill out tags at least and add a few links – maybe even an image or two to make it look pretty – but fundamentally – that is just one extra box (the tags).

Under this theme WordPress becomes much more of a rich Content Management System.

Ok so the basics are the same and I can still just put the basics in and click go – but if I want it to look right and display properly on my homepage I have to do a little bit more than that.

First I write the post (including headline, links, a body image and tags). Then I use Custom Fields to add three images: Main (for the homepage top spot), Left & Right (for the smaller box underneath the flickr photos) and Sidebar (for the homepage sidebar).

I also have other custom fields I haven’t implemented for Side Bar Links, Amazon Book (machine tag) and Flickr Photos – I’ve even played with a map one (enter co-ords and it displays a google map with a pin in it) but as most of my posts are in Jersey it would have got a bit boring.

The other things that you have to take into account with this theme is Catagories – they have now become ALL IMPORTANT.

Every post you want to appear on the homepage main promo space has to be in the General category but I also have to assign it to at least one other as well.

Assigning it to Entertainment will add it to the left hand promospace on the homepage and to New Media would put it on the right.

Adding it to one of Media, Technology, New Media, Lifestyle, Entertainment and Television would display it under one of the tabs in the top promo space.

However if you add it to more than one of these (which is often necessary) it will also appear in multiple tabs (unless you’re creating more than one post each time across every category – which I’m not).

So there are downsides to using an advanced theme but there are also some big plus sides as well. Instead of having the homepage dictated to by time – I can now profile anything I want at any time (and I have over 700 posts – many of which could handle another airing).

What are your thoughts on non-blog like themes?