WordPress Interfaces

If you’re not a regular WP user, then you might not have noticed there’s a large amount of anger and frustration happening in their support forums lately. Basically, some people in the community have spent a great deal of time and effort helping out WP users with layout problems that others ended up with due to quirks in the default layout and in some¹ of the designs that were posted over at Alex King’s WordPress Style Competition. But that wasn’t the direct cause of the current mess in the forums; no the blame for that seems to rest with Michael’s announcement that a variation of his Kubrick style would be included with the next release of WordPress. This was the spark to an apparent holy war between WP’s community support leaders² and WP’s developers, with a bunch of fanboys on the sidelines escalating things.

Is either side guilt free in this situation? Nope.

Can anything be done? Sure, Matthew Mullenweg could just say that nothing is final yet for the next WP release and any further debate on that subject will not be tolerated. Next, Root and Michael Heilemann should have a no-holds barred match where they get to pummel each other…. or they could just start e-mailing another and go into a civil discussion about what problems each has with the other’s design/template/interface³. Matt could also explain exactly what fundamentally flaws and useability issues exist in Root’s interfaces.

Oh and for the record, I’m on my own side in this battle. I like the look of Kubrick but it doesn’t fit my needs so I’ve based my site on Root’s Trident interface. Unfortunately, part of the fallout of the current holy war is that Root has removed the downloads of his interfaces. Since I think those interfaces provide an extremely valuable resource for the WP community; I’m posting links for people to download them here.
Gemini – 2 column interface
Trident – 3 column interface
Vesuvius – 3 column flexible width interface

As a small side note, Root was working on a 3 column flexible width interface called Vesuvius, but it’s also been taken down and I don’t have a copy of it. I’d be happy to post it here; if somebody can help me get a copy of it.

Also for the truly sick, here’s some links to the ongoing debate over in the WP support forums:

• Gemini and Trident templates
• Charleen Style
• Why using Kubrick on 1.3 is a mistake – This is currently the main holy war thread.

¹ Possibly most or all, but I’m not qualified to make that call.
² I could put names here, but if you don’t know who I’m talking about already; then it’s exceedingly unlikely that you’d care.
³ Harsh words have been posted by both sides about things they don’t like in the other’s design/template/interface but no real conversation has taken place. Ok, so I’m cheating and posting some names anyway. Tough luck, this is my blog and I write what I want. 😛

UPDATE 02:45 PM (GMT -06:00): Thanks to Hanni (who posted it in the WP Support forums), I am now mirroring a copy of Vesuvius.