The time has come for a major revision to my cooking and recipe blog and I’ve chosen Mimbo to act as the basis for the redesign.  This is the first in a series of articles that will detail the changes I’ve implemented to get Mimbo working the way that I need it to.

There are few WordPress themes that have garnered as much interest as Mimbo 2.2 by Darren Hoyt. Not only is the layout elegant and very functional, the code is commented well enough to allow anything from minor tweaks to major customizations without much trouble at all. This ease of customization is a major component to Mimbo’s success and in my opinion it is also Mimbo’s strongest point.

As with any theme modification, steps need to be taken in advance to know what your requirements are.  In this case, Mimbo’s layout is nearly everything that I want for the new look, but there are some very real changes that I need implemented.  Styling is almost always a more significant time investment, so it’s best to decide early on if the project will have to be switched to another theme. Before worrying about new header graphics of mucking with CSS styles, it’s necessary to map out the core functionality necessary for your specific needs and make sure that everything is functioning in the way that you need it to. This can save hours in development time.

With that in mind, let’s look at the way that Mimbo functions “out of the box”.

Darren Hoyt's Mimbo. As a theme, it's a work of art

Mimbo has four main “Modules” on the index page. (The sidebar has multiple modules, but I’ll focus on those in a later post) Each of these modules displays the latest information from different defined categories in whatever order the blog owner prefers. Let’s look at each in turn and see how the theme author has this laid out.

1. The Lead Story Module: Designed to handle important news, or the most relevant piece of “core content” of your blog.  It puts it right out there in front of the world at twice the width of anything else on the page.
2. The “Features” Module: a chronological listing from the “Featured” category.  Generally the column where important “bread and butter” articles would be featured.  Again this targets your core content, but it’s content of a less immediately relevant nature than the Lead Story.
3. The Right Column Module: The right column module displays the latest article posted in any number of assigned categories.  This is really the feature that puts Mimbo firmly in the “Magazine Style” WordPress theme category, and it is a very powerful tool which shows the casual visitor a brief overview of the topics you’ve been covering.
4. The Sidebar Module: Mimbo’s sidebar contains all of the usual suspects for a WordPress theme. It has Widget support, categories, and recent this-or-that in place right out of the box.  It also has a few custom pieces like another module for displaying very short snippets of site news and advertising space built in, which just ads another level of power to this theme.

If you’re just looking for a theme that looks great and works flawlessly, Mimbo is good right off the shelf.  Unfortunately, it’s almost never that simple. Every blog or website has its own special requirements and even as good as Mimbo is, it’s just not quite what I need at this point.

The first change I need to implement is in modules 1 and 2.  For my needs, both of these modules needs to display information from the same category. They also need to display the date the post was published and a few other bits of information, such as a spoiler (or excerpt) and author information.

Module 3 is already set up much the way I need it, so the basic functionality does not need to change, but there are some formatting issues that need to be addressed. As with Modules 1 and 2, I need the date published, a better excerpt and author information shown on the main page.

In addition, I want to change the way Mimbo handles some of it’s main display functions to better suit my work flow and the fact that I’ll be importing a live site into a test environment more than once during the build process. This could change the category ID’s on me while I’m testing, and that’s just not a great way to play.

In the next installment, I’ll dive into the code changes necessary to accomplish this first round of goals.  Hopefully it will give a better understanding of theme tweaks in general and allow those of you who have always wanted to mess with your theme files to take the leap into true customization.

For my more experienced readers, perhaps it will persuade you to play around with Mimbo and see if it suits your needs as well.

Until next time!

More on this subject

• Modifying Mimbo 2.2: Step Two – Modifying index.php
• Modifying Mimbo 2.2 Step Three – Changing image handling
• Thoughts on Themes

Just because a theme looks great at first doesn’t mean you won’t find reasons to groan once you get into making it your theme. Take the theme I’m using here. It looks good, it loads quickly and it’s CSS based. All good things. But then we get into the few details that I’ve just spent hours reworking.

• A good portion of the theme navigation was hard coded in German. This could have been simplified greatly if the theme had used a language include file (Localization, it’s a good thing!) Then I would simply have had to change the text in a single file to adjust to the fact that my language and time formats are different from the designers.
• There are a few basic, but in my opinion, absolutely necessary, features missing. For one, there’s no option to edit a post or comment directly when logged in as admin. This means if I catch a typo, I’m stuck going back to the admin menu, moving to the manage posts tab, and then hunting for the post I’ve made the error in. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s tedious at best, so I’m looking at another hour or so going through and making sure all the “little bits” are in place.

There are always other little things you find you’d like to adjust, but that’s part and parcel of any site design, and I doubt it will ever change, whether the template is custom or from a third party.

If possible, check to see what version of WordPress the theme you’re looking at was designed for. You may be shocked to find that older themes call functions is WordPress that simply don’t exist anymore, and will be quite broken when you go to use them. It’s for that very reason that I generally suggest simply installing another copy of WordPress in a subdirectory (or sub folder, whatever you wish to call it) just to make sure that a new theme won’t completely break my WordPress install.

More on this subject

• Modifying Mimbo 2.2: Step One – Identifying Requirements
• Getting started with Thematic child themes – Part 2 – the structure of Thematic
• Getting started with Thematic child themes – Part 1