I’ve had a few requests lately asking if I could share the current smackfoo.com design, dubbed just2. The square (2) denotes the second generation of an earlier design.
In order to answer this question, once, rather than in email-after-email (thanks for the feedback so far, folks) the answer, is no I’m afraid — the current active design, as it stands, won’t be available for download. I have poured a lot of time and energy into getting the layout and core design into shape, where it is aesthetically pleasing, yet fast and standards compliant.
Just2 is one of the fastest rendering designs I have come up thus far and actually dispenses with a lot of plug-in code in favour of increasingly efficient (and site-specific) code. That is an ongoing process that will eventually lead, to a deviation away from a lot of ‘vanilla’ (and occasionally inefficient) plug-in code in favour of a core ‘micro-engine’ that is self contained and can be dressed in pretty much any kind of threads.
That micro-engine will likely end up as a plug-in itself (for ease of management) that will be pretty much mandatory for any of my future designs to work. That’s a pretty long term view right now.. but it’s one of the core reasons the current design is increasingly less likely to be made public.
Over time, I have found that whilst some of the core Wordpress engine is pretty fast, any such enhancements are lost when plug-ins do foolish things that fail, or are prone to errors and lead to performance issues. There is a hell of a lot of plugin code (particularly widget based) that is not xhtml compliant (either strict or transitional) or has mangled javascript which will often slow down a browser as it tries to chug through it something fierce.
However.. all is not lost. I am in fact looking at ’standardising’ a replicant of the current design, which will look pretty similar, minus the ‘grey ninja’, which will work in a more generic Wordpress environment (including a simple, standard loop that supports asides) - that should be done in the next few weeks, whereupon it’ll be available for download.
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of No Tags.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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