Basically, unless you are a very good coder, you should forget that you ever heard of this theme. Here are some of the reasons why:

It is not widget-ready and the sidebar is not contained within <UL> or <OL> tags.

The single post template (single.php) does not call in the sidebar, so when a user goes to an individual post the navigation disappears.

single.php also contains over a dozen validation problems. The Minima theme that alternate0 is based on does not use the single.php template, so I can only assume that the person who adapted this template was a terrible coder. If you haven’t invested any time in this theme it might actually be easier to start with the Minima theme and customize it to look like alternate0. They are very similar.

It is set to a fixed width of 700px, which wastes a lot of screen space for most users.

The links in the header are hard-coded and need to be manually changed in order to be of any use.

It does not contain any RSS links.

The comments.php file has Google ads hard-coded into it and you’ll have to know how to remove them.

comments.php also contains a hard-coded link to a subscription management page on the author’s site and a “subscribe to comments” checkbox that doesn’t work. Both have to be removed.

The sidebar contains hard-coded links to the author’s sites under “Good Reading” and the “Alternate0 is based on…” credits. You’ll also want to remove the “Your Google Ads Here” text while you’re at it. The sidebar is full of junk that you’ll want to get rid of, yet doesn’t include things that would be desirable such as Recent Posts, Links, Pages, and Meta sections.

The sidebar Categories drop-down has a hard-coded /blog/ path, so if your WP installation is not in a folder called “blog” the drop-down will not work.

The footer.php also contains hard-coded links to other sites.

The CSS does not contain several required classes including alignleft, alignright, aligncenter, and wp-caption.

The theme comes with files called templates.php and testimonials.php that appear to be there for no reason other than to promote the author’s other themes and socio-political agenda.

The authors did not respond when I tried to reach them by email, and a comment on the ThoughtMechanics web site in which I politely asked for some help with this template was apparently deleted from the moderation queue without being published or responded to.

In short, it looks nice but be prepared to do a lot of hacking to make it usable.

I am working on fixing this theme because I have a client who likes the way it looks. I’ve gotten all of the above fixed except for the disappearing navigation on single posts, which I am having trouble getting to line up properly (that’s what my question to the authors was about). I also have not made it widget ready because so far my client hasn’t had any need for that, and I have to concentrate on what they do need first. Once it’s fixed I will make it available to others. In the meantime this theme is not one that you can expect to simply unzip and use. I will also try to work some of the WP v.2.7+ features into it such as comment threading. This template was written in 2005 and I have to assume that the author has abandoned it.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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