Regular readers will know that I’ve been using the Copyblogger theme for this blog for some years.
Up until recently it’s been perfect for this blog, simple and clean and not distracting.
However I’ve been gradually upgrading WordPress with the new releases under v.3 recently and, just yesterday, I realized, to my horror, that I couldn’t click on anything in the sidebar. It all seemed to be frozen into immobility.
Now the elements in the sidebar – sign-up form, archives, recent posts and so on – are just loaded into the sidebar widget, so there’s no reason why a simple theme like copyblogger would freeze just by upgrading WordPress. Yet it did.
As soon as I changed to the standard theme that comes with WordPress, called the Twenty-Eleven, everything in the sidebar was back to normal.
I checked on the Copyblogger site for updates and found that the theme hasn’t been updated since WP2.2. There is a new ‘version’ of the Copyblogger theme on a new framework, but it doesn’t look quite the same. Chris Pearson, the creator, has moved on to new themes and, of course, why shouldn’t he? If you provide something free there’s no obligation to keep updating it. Or is there?
You may have wondered why people like Chris create themes and plugins for WordPress and then give them away. The answer is, simply, that every theme and plugin that is installed provides a backlink for the website of the creator (that is if you leave the links back to the originating website intact, which you should do if only to say ‘thanks’). It’s a good way of popularising your site and raising it higher in the Search Engines rankings.
Anyway I’m now looking for a new theme to use on this blog. When I’ve found my ideal theme I’ll update and let you know what I’ve found and why I’m using it.
