WordPress themes | Chris Aldrich

Thoughts on Wikity for WordPress

I spun up a new instance of Wikity today at http://wikity.chrisaldrich.net/ to test it out for potential use as a personal online wiki. My goal was also to test out how it may or may not work with IndieWeb-based WordPress pieces too.

Below are my initial thoughts and problems.

The /home/ page has a lot of errors and warnings. (Never a good sign.)

It took me a few minutes to figure out where the Wik-it! bookmarklet button was hiding. Ideally it would have been in the start card that described how the bookmarklet would work (in addition to its original spot).

The Wikity theme seems to have some issues when using for http vs. https.

Less seems to work out of the box with https
The main card for entering “Name of Concept or Data” didn’t work at all under https. It only showed the title and wouldn’t save. Switching to http seemed to fix it and show the editor bar.

I’ve tried copying over from Aaron Davis‘ Wikity instance, but the cardbox seems to fail on my end.

Nothing seemed to work at all when I had my site as https. In fact, it redirected to a URL that seemed like it wanted to run update.php for some bizarre reason.
On http I at least get a card saying that the process failed.
- Not sure what may be causing this.
- Doesn’t seem to matter how many cards it is.
- Perhaps it’s the fact that Aaron’s site is https? I notice that his checkbox export functionality duplicates his entire URL including the https:// within the export box which seems to automatically prepend http://
- Copying to my own wiki seems to vaguely work using http, but failed on https.

Multiple * in the markdown editor functionality within WordPress doesn’t seem to format the way I’d expect.

Sadly, the original Wikity.cc site is down, but the theme still includes a link to it front and center on my website.

The home screen quick new card has some wonky CSS that off centers it.

Toggling full screen editing mode in new cards from the home screen makes them too big and obscures the UI making things unusable.

The primary multi-card home display doesn’t work well with markup the way the individual posts do.

The custom theme seems to be hiding some of the IndieWeb pieces. It may also be hampering the issuance of webmention as I tried sending one to myself and it only showed up as a pingback. It didn’t feel worth the effort to give the system a full IndieWeb test drive beyond this.

Doing this set up as a theme and leveraging posts seems like a very odd choice. From my reading, Mike Caulfield was relatively new to WordPress development when he made this. Even if he was an intermediate developer, he should be proud of his effort, including his attention to some minute bits of UI that others wouldn’t have considered. To make this a more ubiquitous solution, it may have been a better choice to create it as a plugin, do a custom post type for wiki cards and create a separate section of the database for them instead of trying to leverage posts. This way it could have been installed on any pre-existing WordPress install and the user could choose their own favorite theme and still have a wiki built into it. In this incarnation it’s really only meant to be installed on a fresh stand-alone site.

I only used the Classic Editor and didn’t even open up the Gutenberg box of worms in any of my tests.

Summary

The Wikity theme hasn’t been maintained in four years and it looks like it’s going to take quite a bit of work (or a complete refactoring) to make it operate the way I’d want it to. Given the general conceptualization it may make much more sense to try to find a better maintained solution for a wiki.

The overarching idea of what he was trying to accomplish, particularly within the education space and the OER space, was awesome. I would love nothing more than to have wiki-like functionality built into my personal WordPress website, particularly if I could have different presentations for the two sides but still maintain public/private versions of pieces and still have site-wide tagging and search. Having the ability to port data from site to site is a particularly awesome idea.

Is anyone actively still using it? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about problems/issues they’ve seen. Is it still working for you as expected? Is it worth upgrading the broken bits? Is it worth refactoring into a standalone plugin?

Replied to What is up with the 2020 WP Theme by

autumn (Reclaim Hosting Community)

Curious if anyone has any experience with the new 2020 theme. I’m particularly confused as to why on fresh install it seems like an out of the box theme. But then if you touch the Customizer at all it fills your site with all this content for a musume in Sweden!?!?!

I like using the customizer to change the look and feel of my site but it seems I can’t use it with this theme without it doing this dump of content.

Can anyone point me to articles about this theme and why this content is supposed to help me? Maybe this is just a new way of working with a theme that I’m not used to?

Autumn, It’s been a while since I’ve done a fresh install, but I’ll confirm that what you’ve experienced is true. The base theme was shown off using a Swedish museum, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear that portion, but I too was a bit freaked out by the content they created on my behalf.

From what I can tell, they’re creating the content to help users realize how to set up a separate front page and a separate blog page which isn’t always intuitive to newcomers to the platform. Fortunately they haven’t made too much useless content and new users can simply either edit the front page the theme creates to something that suits them or just delete that page and create something of their own.

The only other content I can see that one might want to modify are the two footer widgets that you can either edit or simply delete or replace.

In all I think they’ve taken this route simply to give new users an idea about how they could set up their sites and give them an idea about the way the theme uses the Gutenberg editor. (It’s not too different from the long standing “Hello World” introductory post or the “Hi, this is a comment.” first comment on a fresh install.) For people new to WordPress this is probably pretty helpful, though for older hands it may be annoying. Fortunately the content the customizer creates is pretty minimal and easy to get rid of.

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.