I changed the theme of my website the other day, so I spent a few minutes this morning updating the microformats in it to be more IndieWeb friendly. Here’s hoping I haven’t broken anything too badly.
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Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media. View all posts by Chris Aldrich
So here’s a rough outline of what I’ve done to my child theme:
header.phpfile to remove the erroneoushfeedmicroformat that was being put on all pages.archive.phppage to addh-feedandhfeedto create the appropriate feed pages (I need to doublecheck this in an actual reader, but it looks good on the page and seems to parse properly.)functions.phpfile, I’ve wrapped the_content ine-content, wrapped the_excerpt inp-summaryfunctions.phpfile, I’ve added a filter that will add h-entry to the correct place.The nice part is that this means I can use Brid.gy Publish to syndicate to Twitter. It also means that my replies to sites should also properly remove the reply context and only send my reply content.
There are still a few small niggling things to clean up, but these always seem to be the most difficult.
Hooray!
I’m too afraid to change my theme to anything other than the ones I know to support microformat 2 and IndieWeb plugins. I have found many excellent themes for my WordPress website but none of them support microformat 2 or even microformat 1. I do not have expertise to modify them to support microformat 2. Last year, I contacted a designer about creating a microformat 2 theme but the cost was way outside my limited budget.
I know that feeling all too well. We definitely need more choice and more robust theme support. Hopefully this experiment will at least give people another option. I’ll also say that I’ve learned a lot in the process of diving in up to my elbows for a day. Now that I’ve done it once with some reasonable results, perhaps I’ll take a crack at a few more? I still want to take a crack at upgrading the new Twentytwenty theme and helping someone like the brilliant Anders Norén understand them better.
I will say it’s a much easier process with more modern DRY themes which have fewer places to look/check. A reasonable WordPress developer with even a passing knowledge of microformats should be able to convert a pre-existing theme in about a day barring any bizarre coding irregularities in the original theme.
I’ll try to document most of what I’ve learned with some code examples and snippets on this theme shortly so that others might follow along or make their own modifications.
I can’t commit to doing it personally, but perhaps people might try adding links to popular/useful themes to https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Development#Themes as suggestions for developers to spend some time on updating/converting?
I specifically chose Twentyfifteen because it’s big, popular, fairly simple, and robust, but it still has some flexibility in terms of changing the look and feel by using small things within the customizer. I think it’s also a very good, basic template for a personal website. I may take a look at some others in these areas for similar reasons.
Congratulations with the successful redesign! Looks pretty cool and modern. The images stand out better and the scrolling effect is nice. Good job!
I wish I could take credit for all of it, but it’s a pre-existing WordPress theme to which I’ve done some small modifications and added microformats.