Replied to a tweet by Andrew Wetzel (Twitter)
There are some additional details for making themes IndieWeb friendly here: https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Themes
Several of us can give you help and guidance if you want to take a crack at it: https://chat.indieweb.org/wordpress/
 
Read Getting Started with Block Themes by Ben DwyerBen Dwyer (ThemeShaper)
The rationale With Full Site Editing on the horizon for WordPress, Theme creators need to start to learn how to make themes in a different way. Full Site Editing is sea change in the way that themes work. When Themes were first added to WordPress, they were simple; just a few template files and some...
This makes it seem like new themes with Gutenberg may be easier than I would have suspected? I may have to try this out soon, though I should also look at some of the newer themes that are out that use similar set ups.
Replied to Twenty Twenty-One Available for Download by Mel Choyce (melchoyce.design)

I had the privilege of designing this year’s WordPress default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, which was released yesterday alongside WordPress 5.6. I started working on the initial concepts for the theme back in July, so seeing it finally launched is fantastic.

This is awesome news. Congratulations on the culmination of a lot of hard work! I can’t wait to start tinkering with it, particularly to see what I can learn from it by looking at the code.
Bookmarked Velox Theme by David WolfpawDavid Wolfpaw (GitHub)
Development repository for the Velox Theme for WordPress - davidwolfpaw/velox-theme

Cool! Looks like another IndieWeb friendly WordPress theme on the horizon. I’ll need to take a look at it soon.

David Wolfpaw in #80945 (THEME: Velox – 1.0.5) – WordPress Themes ()

Read About Components (WP Theme Components)
Watch a demo with Cameron Jones from WP Theme Components and Nathan Wrigley from WP Builds What is a theme component? Theme components are bite sized code snippets that can be reused across multiple themes. Using theme components makes it easier to reuse the same code across multiple themes. What is...
Relatively quick and to the point. Watched the video at 1.25x. I’m intrigued.
Bookmarked WordPress Theme Components (WP Theme Components)
Theme components are bite sized code snippets that can be reused across multiple themes, but are either too small or don’t make sense to be released as a plugin. Stop cluttering up your functions.php file and start using theme components! Who are theme components for? Th...
This looks interesting and useful. Perhaps a potential solution for adding small tidbits of microformats mark up to one’s theme at a more granular level than the mf2 plugin? I can see use cases for other snippets too like accepting Webmentions automatically, etc.

Making IndieWeb Friendly WordPress Themes: An IndieWebCamp Popup Session

The IndieWeb WordPress community could use some more theme options.

Let’s get together as a community and host a theme raising (a play on the idea of the old barn raising). We can all work/hack together to make some of the popular WordPress themes more IndieWeb friendly. We’ll discuss methods for adding the necessary Microformats and best ways to indieweb-ify a WordPress theme.

Either bring your own favorite theme or work from one on a list.

All levels are welcome!

Beginners and those without coding experience are welcome/encouraged to attend. We’ll try to help newcomers learn to begin tinkering with some WordPress theme code. If you don’t have a GitHub account yet, you might create one beforehand and we’ll show you how to use it for development, but even without it you can still do a lot with just a text editor.

Details

When: 2020-09-26 9:30 – 11:30 AM (Pacific) / 12:30 – 2:30 PM (Eastern)
Event page: https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/making-indieweb-friendly-wordpress-themes-8fs9gAVX3OkV
hashtag: for social media and used to create an Etherpad for the session:
Etherpadhttps://etherpad.indieweb.org/WPandMicroformats for note taking during the session
Streaming video/audio platform: Zoom (link to come)
Demos: Yes – when we’re done, show off how well your new hacked theme works on your site.

RSVP

Newcomers can post a comment on this post below or reply yes via Twitter to https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1300562134699393024. Or you can feel free to just show up on the morning of the event.

If you feel able, RSVP at Meetable or post an indie RSVP on your own website.

Prerequisites

Bring your own theme or a theme you’d like to make more IndieWeb friendly by adding Microformats v2 support. Ideas for possible themes can be found at https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Development#Themes

(Optional) Create a GitHub account which you can use/learn during the process. Those who don’t want a GitHub account can simply use their text editor of choice to modify the relevant theme files.

Volunteers

We’re always happy to have additional help! If you’d like to volunteer or help organize and run the session, please touch base with Chris Aldrich or David Shanske in the IndieWeb Meta chat room.

I look forward to seeing everyone there!

Read On Digital Gardens, Blogs, Personal Spaces, and the Future by Justin Tadlock (WordPress Tavern)
I have been thinking a lot about digital gardens this week. A blog post by Tom McFarlin re-introduced me to the term, which led me down a rabbit hole of interesting ideas on creating a digital space…

My blog posts were merely random thoughts — bits and pieces of my life. 

Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:52AM

Despite having something that worked sort of like a blog, I maintained various resources and links of other neat ideas I found around the web. It was a digital garden that I tended, occasionally plucking weeds and planting new ideas that may someday blossom into something more. 

The idea of a thought space hiding in here….
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:53AM

“The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.”
It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself. 

For many, social media took over their “streams” of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).

Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.

Getting away from “branding” is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I’d much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:56AM

Personal websites can be so much more than a progression of posts over time, newer posts showing up while everything from the past is neatly tucked on “page 2” and beyond. 

This is an interesting idea and too many CMSes are missing this sort of UI baked into them as a core idea. CMSes could do a better job of doing both: the garden AND the stream
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 09:57AM

While I lament the loss of some of the artistry of the early web and lay much of the blame at the feet of blogging platforms like WordPress, such platforms also opened the web to far more people who would not have otherwise been able to create a website. Democratizing publishing is a far loftier goal than dropping animated GIFs across personal spaces. 

WordPress has done a lot to democratize publishing and make portions of it easier, but has it gone too far in crystalizing the form of things by not having more wiki-like or curation-based features?
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:01AM

Throughout the platform’s history, end-users have remained at the mercy of their WordPress theme. Most themes are built around what WordPress allows out of the box. They follow a similar formula. Some may have a fancy homepage or other custom page templates. But, on the whole, themes have been primarily built around the idea of a blog. Such themes do not give the user true control over where to place things on their website. While some developers have attempted solutions to this, most have never met the towering goal of putting the power of HTML and CSS into the hands of users through a visual interface. This lack of tools has given rise to page builders and the block editor. 

an apropos criticsm
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:02AM

I also want them to be able to easily build something like Tom Critchlow’s wikifolder, a digital collection of links, random thoughts, and other resources.
More than anything, I want personal websites to be more personal. 

Those in the IndieWeb want this too!! I definitely do.
Annotated on August 12, 2020 at 10:03AM

Read Improve Your Remote Collaboration With P2 by Miguel LezamaMiguel Lezama (The WordPress.com Blog)
P2 powers internal collaboration at WordPress.com — and now it’s free for everyone. As more collaboration is happening remotely and online — work yes, but increasingly also school and persona…
It looks like Automattic is dusting off their old p2 / o2 theme projects for a new remote working platform? Here’s hoping that they consider Webmention support for true distributed cross-site @​mentions.
Watched Anatomy of a Great Faculty Website by Steve RyanSteve Ryan from WPCampus 2020 Online - July 29-30 - Where WordPress meets Higher Education

Within higher education, requests to build websites for individual faculty members sit at the absolute bottom of the work queue for most marketing/communications teams. If this type of product is offered at all, it typically uses a self-service model; the institution will provide the platform while the faculty member will provide the content. And while this is the most sustainable model for most small and mid-sized web teams, it tends to produce multiple websites that are ineffective at communicating even simple messages. Worse, they have a high tendency to become the poorest reflections of the institution with a high rate of abandonment or misuse.

Let's fix that tendency together. With a careful examination of what really matters to faculty members who are looking to create and maintain their own websites, we can begin to build better sites. With better sites (and a little luck), you can start to derive value from the project at the bottom of your work pile.

Together we'll talk about:

  • A simple analysis of the types of content that you'll typically find within a faculty website.
  • A "wish list" for the types of content that you (as a marketer) would really like to see from these types of sites.
  • A working example of a theme that delivers on these key concepts and adds some "quick wins" which makes for a better experience.
  • How to leverage the capabilities of WordPress multisite to produce more value from collections of these type of sites.

This is an awesome little session at WPCampus 2020 Online. (Video for it available shortly.) It reminds me a lot of the Drupal project Open Scholar that does something similar. I can see it being useful for folks in the Domain of One’s Own space.

I totally want to start using something like this myself to not only test it out, but to build in the proper microformats v2 mark up so that it’s IndieWeb friendly. Perhaps a project at the planned IWC Pop-up Theme raising session?

Read Registering & Displaying A Sidebar by Joseph Dickson (joseph-dickson.com/)
Registering a sidebar gives our theme an area where dynamic content can be added by Widgets and managed by the site owner using a drag an drop interface. This can include menus, custom HTML, Images and additional features introduced by Plugins. In this post we’ll register a sidebar, that will then be assigned dynamic widgets and displayed on our site’s footer.