One of the core failures of Wordpress, at least in this current version, is how confuddled the widgets vs theme vs plugin options are. For instance, I had been recently using a theme that had a built-in RSS subscribe function. It would display, rather nicely I might add, a big RSS logo that most people understand how to use. Rewind a couple weeks and I’ve been tinkering with various new themes — but I overlooked a couple important parts during this aesthetic adventuring.
My good pal Ken chimed in via twitter and pointed out this current theme wasn’t offering up a way to subscribe via RSS! Now, in this day of social media RSS is still very important. I like to write, so a blog is a natural platform — it sort of helps, you know, if you can make sure your readers can subscribe! Derp. Of course, Twitter helped me out here, so social networking does indeed have its value some days.
Simply put, my failure was not remembering that the missing RSS 0ption was built in to the theme. That leads me to my grievance with Wordpress in its current form. The line between theme options, plugins, and widgets (plugins-that-arent-really-plugins-but-sorta-are) is far too grey. I’m sure the pay-for themes may offer all the bells & whistles that I might desire, but let’s be honest here, I’m not exactly running a super high profile site. Of the ho-jillions of themes that are out there, it’s easy to see just how varied they are in the little details. Lesson learned.
Fortunately there is a little widget that works really well for what I needed. Here’s hoping the next generation of Wordpress will sort out all this theme-vs-option-vs-widget-plugin mess.