---
title: Themes
date: '2018-08-16T11:50:34-04:00'
permalink: /themes/
tags:
    - tinkering
---

Sigh. I am wrestling with a few problems here, which have me a bit stymied. The theme you currently see[^1] is a child theme of [Independent Publisher 2](https://wordpress.com/theme/independent-publisher-2), which is a WordPress.com fork of [Independent Publisher](https://wordpress.org/themes/independent-publisher/), originally developed by Raam Dev. The thing I like about the entire Independent Publisher family is the extent to which it allows focus on the text; it’s typographically clean and engaging, and pretty flexible overall.

Except for a couple of things. The original Independent Publisher doesn’t support a full-width cover image — not a deal-breaker, but I’ve grown a little attached to the one I’m using here. And its single-column layout winds up looking pretty odd on individual post pages. Independent Publisher 2 takes care of both of those issues, and adds a range of other functionality.[^2]

But Independent Publisher 2 doesn’t *really* support post formats, which Independent Publisher does quite well. I’ve managed to do a bit of tinkering with my child theme’s functions.php in order to approximate post format support, which is necessary to my [micro.blog](http://micro.blog/kfitz) integration, but I’m running into oddities that make clear how partial that support is. For instance: if I use the post date to automatically create a title for my Asides,[^3] those titles appear on the posts, which, if the posts were really being treated as Asides, they wouldn’t.

So I have a few options:

1. Figure out how to hack Independent Publisher to support the full-width header image I want.
2. Figure out how to hack Independent Publisher 2 to fully support post formats.
3. Find a new theme that actually does all the things that I want it to do, and looks the way that I want it to look.[^4]

I’d be happy to receive your suggestions!

[^1]: As of 11:30 am, Thursday 16 August 2018, that is; this is likely to change soon.
[^2]: Some of which, like pull quotes, I haven't really used, but it's nice to know that I could.
[^3]: So that they don't appear in my list of posts as one '(no title)' after another.
[^4]: A little tinkering here would be NBD.