Yes, you read that right. The Options WordPress theme is my least favorite.
Why?
Too many Options.
For those of you that don’t know, Options was a theme I released back in February this year, and it has since garnered well over 30,000 downloads (these numbers will seem insignificant as the WordPress theme directory continues rolling).
One of the reasons the theme has been so popular is its options page and magazine-style look. Just take a look at what the theme settings page looks like for the most recent version.
Yes, that’s a lot of options. Too many.
Why too many theme options is bad
I first started putting a lot of thought into this with Ian Stewart’s post, Theme Options Can Make Your Theme Worse. The topic recently came up again when he linked to Jeff Chandler’s post Why I Don’t Use Shifter Anymore (Shifter is apparently another them with a lot of options).
From my experience, users tend to like all these extra options straight from their admin panel. The less coding work, the better, right?
Yes, until you need to modify something that’s not included on the theme settings page.
One of the things I’ve been moving toward is the idea of child themes. If you don’t know what child themes are, Dan Philibin has a good post explaining this: Frameworks, Child Themes, Filters, and Hooks?. I’ll also be going into some details in a few future posts about this concept.
A lot of theme options can just create a mess in the long run. It gives you less flexibility with child themes and personal modifications.
For example, let’s say that I wanted to create a child theme for Options. The biggest problem I would run into when making this theme is having to account for every option already available in the [Options] parent theme.
I would also lose a lot of flexibility in adding new features through child themes.
Now, let’s suppose I didn’t want to make child themes for Options. With a theme as complex as it is, there’ll always be fairly regular updates because the code is always being optimized. Well, if you’ve modified something in the files, you probably wouldn’t want to update your theme.
For that reason, the child theme concept is much better. But, with this particular theme, there’s less room for future goodies.
Why I’m switching to child themes
I recently wrote a post showcasing the power of child themes. It shows a parent theme and what I transformed it into on ThemeHybrid.com with a child theme.
Using child themes, I can regularly update the parent theme and let users modify their child themes in any way.
The Options theme just doesn’t cut it as a solid foundation to work from because I can’t do as much with it now that so many things are set in stone, so to speak.
Some theme options are good, but if you’re a theme author, take some time out to plan for the future of your theme. If you think you’ll ever go down the path of parent/child themes, then theme options should be kept to a minimum.
For those of you that love the Options theme, don’t worry. I’m always working on it and will continue doing so. I could easily write a post about why it’s my favorite theme.
I agree with your reasoning here. I love what the Options theme did for my site, but as a beta adopter many of the modifications I made were to the files, and it was labor intensive enough that I haven’t been able to find the time yet to upgrade to the current version.
I’ve also been taking some web-related courses and have become interested in doing some of my own designs. For the reasons you point out, the child theme may be the better way to go than continuing to mod the Options theme.
A final point is that the beta version of Options—I don’t know enough about the current versions to comment on them—required users to dig into the code a bit to make any significant modifications. I, for one, learned a hell of a lot in the process. And there was the catch. As soon as I began to learn and started to figure out what I was looking at, I wanted more room to tinker, not less—and where I’d once seen only the power of the options you provided, I soon began to consider the theme’s framework to be both enabling and constraining at once.
But, if the child theme comes with “recommended settings” you don’t need to account the style for other settings. Explain to the user that this child theme were meant to use for this settings.
wideaperture
Yes, the theme is both “enabling and contraining” because of all the options. The current versions are a lot easier to work with, but there’s still the same issue with updating if modifying the theme files.
By working with child themes, we can still pick and choose certain features to add to our themes. We just have to add them or hope the theme author creates a child theme with those certain features. Since I now have a nifty new ideas forum, users can tell me what type of things they’d like to see.
Pangeran
Try telling the user base of Options that they need to only use certain features or a “recommended setting,” and you’ll create mass confusion and a lot of pissed off users. This would just put more work on the support forums because users will inevitably want to make certain settings work.
My reasoning behind this is that if there should be a recommend setting to use the child theme, then whatever settings shouldn’t be used, should not have been included in the first place.
This is a bit off the point though. Options is less extensible because of its options page — there’s not as many new features I could roll out for it through child themes.
But, a solidly coded base theme without all those options can be extended in any way you like. Want a features gallery? Add it to a child theme. Want footer widgets? Add it to a child theme.
These type of things are harder to implement with Options.
I’m very much looking forward to your foray into child themes. Indeed, I stuck with Structure instead of moving to Options because of the fact that there WERE just too many options!
I can totally understand what you’re saying but I LOVE the theme and appreciate all the work & effort you put into and into helping answer all the questions associated with it!
Justin, I thought Ian opinion is correct. I have a similar opinion. Too many option isn’t good. Perhaps, the basic inspiration is correct, people are easier to design the looks of their site. But, it won’t fulfill their desire at all.
Finally, Custom, custom, and custom. That’s what they want, because they are looking something different than others.
But, personally i appreciate your work. That was great, absolutely great. Anw, what do you think about the looks of Empire Online? In my opinion, awesome. A truly Magazine layout
I apologise for my poor English.
Justin, your Options Theme is the best appearance to WordPress which was supposed to see the chance, even though I am leading the blog very intensively for the over half year. I will be using Yours Options Theme and I modified to my needs enough long for, he will be free for taking down together with novelties. Unfortunately, Justin, I won’t be with You (and i will change prime theme), if anything to Options Theme is in frames of the payment - the best appearance you created which so far, should be free, in all its varieties. Thats true - if You insert paid elements into Options, you lose many users, include me and a lot of persons which I recommended your theme.
Greetings.
Bryan
That’s another good reason for not adding too many options — it can start to become more of a chore for the blogger just setting things up.
A Cowboy’s Wife
It’s definitely a great theme and is very useful for many people, especially for those that don’t want to touch code too much.
Hning
The more options, the less custom it becomes. Sounds a bit backwards, doesn’t it?
The link to Empire Online redirects to something that doesn’t really have a magazine look.
midv
Well, I suppose you will no longer be with me.
Child themes for Options will be for exclusive members of ThemeHybrid.com in the future. Sure, I might release a freebie now and then. Of course, the parent theme (Options) is free.
I could care less how many users I lose, including you.
I make themes because I like doing it. If I want to charge a few dollars for an extra add-on or child theme, I’ll do it. I don’t care if I only had 1 user. Or, 0 users for that matter. I do what I do because I simply like doing it.
I don’t have the time to worry over silly comments like “I won’t be with You” or “you lose many users.”
Now that’s where you lost me, Justin; right after reading your reply to midv. He may not be a major in English, and I happen to find your strong reply totally inadequate especially coming from an ESL teacher in South Korea, right?
See, you seem to put little price on the users of your themes - or their opinion, for that matter - although their embrace of your ideas and innitiative is what got you in the spotlight in the first place. Funny, ’cause I’m (soon “was”) incidentally one of them. And I’ll be clear on this point: it’s not the money or how you’re making it off of your theme(s), it’s the attitude I think I dislike.
Bad sign for business, if I may say…
PS. Sorry, I actually got an account on Theme Hybrid, but I don’t have the credentials at hand right now to login in.
Of course I am backing paid appearances of the type up with “Child”, however I am not backing paid cores up - Options Theme. I am reliable, that paid “Childs” will do you good and they will give a little bit of money into the wallet. I hope that main Options Theme every now and then will also be improved, I hope that you won’t deal with only creating paid themes. I think, that Yours Options Theme is the best free theme to WordPress and I hope that he will be improved and still free.
As for options - I think that their large amounts are a virtue. Large amounts of the option and a possibility of placing everything in the appearance are a great virtue for me. For example, there should be an option like “SHOW” or “NOT SHOW” in post.
My English isn’t perfect, I don’t live in an English-speaking country and I didn’t learn English at school
Widaperture wrote:
I agree. I never used PHP till I started fooling with WordPress and themes. Well-commented code helped me figure it out right quickly.
A theme with a zillion control-panel options not only makes it harder to modify the code to suit — seems to me it also opens the floodgates for every single user to ask for more features and customizations. (Glad I don’t have to support them!)
I totally agree with you that child themes are the way to go. I recently discovered the Zen Theme for Drupal and loved the Sandbox-like approach.
It comes with a layout.css that’s really well documented (with comments in the different sections), and an ‘empty’ stylesheet where all CSS id’s and classes are coded, but not yet styled. So you only have to style those to your likes.
Not as easy as checking some theme prefs in a webform, but very flexible.
Oh… sorry justin
The link should be Empire Online.
Amen. All too often, we seem to forget the Keep it Simple rule in the rush to upgrade to the latest and greatest tech doodad. This entry serves as an important reminder than great blogs strip away the superfluous and allow both the blogger and his/her visitors to focus on the conversation at hand.
Well said.
Zeta
I would argue that it’s my attitude that has set me apart from the crowd. My attitude has always been, “I’m going to do what I want to do and say what I want to say whether you like it or not.”
And, users have definitely embraced those “ideas” and “initiative.”
If I put so little price on the users of my themes, I suppose my Ideas forum is worthless.
It has never been about business for me. I just like to experiment, but I definitely don’t like people coming to my site telling me things such as they’re leaving or won’t support me if I charge money. Folks have their own blogs; they can say whatever they want there.
midv
Thanks for stopping back by and clearing that up a bit.
Trust me, as an English-language teacher, I understand imperfect English better than most.
Sllouan Thompson
Good point:
This is a major problem I deal with every day. Don’t get me wrong, I like helping users out, but when the word “options” comes out, people tend to think we can keep piling more features on.
Tibor
I think it’s actually better to make users start diving into the code. At least that way, they’re learning a bit about how things work.
The more theme options we put in the backend, the less users know about how their sites run.
Hning
Thanks. Empire Online does have a magazine-style design, but it doesn’t suit my tastes. I think it’s too busy, but it’s definitely better than some others I’ve seen.
Carmi
The Keep It Simple rule should apply to all aspects of design. My next theme release will probably be more powerful than any other theme I’ve put out there, but it will be very simple in design with few options on the backend.
Call me johnny-come-lately. After a lengthy search of hundreds of themes, yours was the only one that came close to what I had in mind for my web site and saves me beaucoup coding work so many months ago I installed 1.0.1 Beta of the Options Theme and started setting up its options and my site.
Due to a major move I have just now come back to that project and find that you have advanced your design significantly. First of all I don’t fully understand the relationship between justintadlock.com and themehybrid.com. Despite that, I like your work so I signed up as a paid member on themehybrid.com and would like to upgrade my site before going further. I assume the Shadow child theme will be the same as the Options Dark theme I have now. How do you suggest I proceed? Do I wipe out my theme directory structure and start from scratch with version 1.3 or overwrite?
jmcd
Thanks for signing up for the exclusive membership. Theme Hybrid is basically just an extension of what I’ve been doing here. I felt that my WordPress work had just kind of outgrown my personal blog, so I moved my themes over to the new site.
As for upgrading to the latest version, just delete your old Options folder and add the new folders you get with the latest download. If you run into any trouble, stop by the support forums.
Thanks for the quick reply. I’m off and running.
I think that there is a middle market for people who want the flexibility that Options gives without having to write code.
It does constrain ultimate flexibility, because there is such a range of things to think about - but if ultimate flexibility is what you are after, perhaps start from somewhere else.
For me, I love the flexibility that allows me switch my featured post section of my politics site for a video feed for two months of the year when a lot of videos are being released again, and then just switch it back.
Horses for courses, and I like the Options horse.
I think that perhaps it means a little time playing up front before committing to a particular theme.
I think that was more or less what you said when you started.
Count me in with the users who love Options, particularly the early version, because of all the, well, options. However, similar to the first commenter, I haven’t been able to upgrade because of all the work I had to do to the code itself. Since I’m not much for documenting workflow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to carry over my changes to a new version. Then again, the theme works so well that I don’t see needing to replace it for quite a while. Well done, Justin!