Context specific theme changes

train crash
Progress

It looks like I have run into the first set of limits that I will have to code around. To be honest, I am surprised that I did not run in tot his sooner.

What to do with new users?

The Author Buzz home page looks quite lovely for me, a logged in user, but for a visitor who wants to sign up… Just no. Not at all optimal.

I noticed this before with WordPress. Themes and widgets seem to be created with the assumption that everyone should see the same thing all the time. For blog posts, this is probably about right but for landing pages what needs to be shown depends on who you are showing things to.

For example, a site looking to sign up new users is going to want to direct non-logged-in users to a sign-up page while logged in users might be better off seeing something else entirely.

I am not the first person to wonder about this, and there are a few different ways to approach the problem.

Themeing with exceptions

This is another edge case situation. There are some examples where it would be preferable to make an exception to the standard theme layout. Sometimes this is one or two pages. It looks like “page types” might be what I want to look in to.

Custom widgets hell

The use case listing that I have generated for what we need to do next has a hell worthy list of custom widgets that seem to only exist for one page and only then in some cases. I’m sorry, but I ain’t coding that.

Instead, what I plan to do is look at these edge case requirements and see if there are unifying factors. It is almost always the case that unique such as this actually exist in a cluster of slight variations. About half the time,m this approach shows up other possible uses that will, one time in three, be asked for later.

I am not going to got to custom widget hell today.

Bugs

So far I have only found one outright bug. It seems to be a conflict between theme and plugin that so far only effects admins. Therefore, it is a low priority for me to fix. (Sorry admins, you are expected to cope).

Any bug reports that you find as a user should go in the Help and Support group.

Back to the grindstone for me.

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