After putting off writing posts, I log in, rubbing my hands together to warm them up for some vigorous typing, and am greeted with a message to update WordPress to 3.5. Okay, I decide, I should probably update because it’s been over a week since it’s release. However, the little news blurb explaining the details of 3.5 caught my interest, so I go to read the article. Then, I’m forced to watch the video because they can’t just type out the changes (I hate watching videos because I’m listening to music) and there’s nothing that the video medium particularly adds. (Seriously, someone in HCI should be writing a paper on how to properly spend time making videos vs. writing articles. And give me some acknowledgement. I’ll give that person a cookie.)

I’m a little (okay, maybe a lot) antagonistic because I’ve been bed-ridden the past 2 days and am still not feeling that great. Sincerest apologies. On a less angry note, one of the changes that caught my attention was the new Twenty Twelve theme. The version of the site you are most likely using is one that I have written a customized layout for so the following will make no sense. However, for the few who are “special” and understand a bit of website code, read on.

I have been using the Twenty Ten theme because of its simplicity and as I had no better header image and liked the options presented in that set over Twenty Eleven, I skipped Twenty Eleven. With Apple’s Retina (and hopefully more devices becoming more hi-res capable) and at least one person I know of probably using a mobile device to read this blog, updating to Twenty Twelve seemed a practical decision.

Twenty Twelve, I presume, uses media queries (see the offical W3C doc or a visual gallery for a quick example of this CSS3 function). I am a little lazy to look into the code right now. However, I found it is a bit clumsy. Despite my general leaning towards minimalism (as exemplified by the layout I wrote), I’ve found for the “special” audience, the header image is sort of welcoming and I try to use a tranquil image. It’s also a big sign to me which version of the site I’m on.

Twenty Twelve has no images in its default, base initialization. I was actually a little perplexed as to how to add a header image because the advertisement on the themes page claimed you can “Make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background.” I skimmed through the first page of reviews and one user said a guide would have been nice. I must agree. Although he was asking for a guide that was more for code tweaking than simple “adjustments” through the WP Admin Panel. Nonetheless, I eventually found the tiny “Header” link in the sidebar and uploaded a custom header image from my Thailand trip.

I think an unspoken rule of thumb for media queries is to cut out header images for mobile sites if it is short enough or the height-width ratio is too small. It looks silly and takes up unnecessary vertical space. Maybe they overlooked this, thinking not many users would want to use header images as minimalism seems to be becoming popular. Whatever the reason, this is why I felt their implementation was a little clumsy. I also read the theme doesn’t seem to play nice with IE, so [legacy] cross-browser support may be lacking as well and presumably there is no fallback legacy code.

One last thing on Twenty Twelve’s minimalism is the move to widgets. Calendar, search, archive list – I like to keep these on the sidebar (also notably missing on my layout). So, when I didn’t see them, I was a little confused until I realized what was missing. This took a little trip to the search engine where, after watching half of a video that was not very helpful, I found a site that was. I don’t see myself spending a lot of time messing around with customizing the theme or poking at the features, but none of this was particularly intuitive and I think that is what irks me the most.

WordPress has generally been good about being intuitive and easy to use/customize, so this experience was a bit of a surprise.