I’m sick of WordPress so I wrote a new theme to make it worse

In an attempt to have a WordPress theme optimized for running on the Raspberry Pi 3, I went through the hurdles of writing my own theme. Among my goals was to create something entirely free of third party CSS and JavaScript frameworks. Actually, I wanted a theme free from JavaScript altogether and in my opinion there are already more than enough websites built on the Bootstrap framework (you’ll recognize them, they all look the same).

Another important aspect of making my own theme was to fight the continuous introduction of new features in WordPress that in my opinion are either useless or expose a new attack surface. Gone are the days when WordPress was a simple piece of blogging software, today it has become an application framework (or is it platform) and I won’t have anything to do with it if I can help it.

If you are curious as to what features I’m unhappy with, please take a look at the “disabled functionality” section on the pureRegression theme page.

Instead of adding more bloat to WordPress, I would really like to see the developers focusing on making the “writing” experience better. WordPress is thirteen years old and I’m still using an external text editor to write my posts. If you compare working with content in WordPress to the Ghost blogging platform, I would argue that the latter is superior in every way. Sadly I can’t remember a single WordPress core update in the last six years that actually introduced any improvement when it comes to working with content.

Though my home-brewed WordPress theme doesn’t adhere closely to the official WordPress guidelines and must unfortunately suffer from my lack of CSS skills, it does at least shine when it comes to load times and performance. That is good enough for me while I keep looking for another long term solution for this blog. My only requirement is that the software can run on a Raspberry Pi 3 powered by Slackware ARM, and has support for importing posts from WordPress.

I’ll probably end up going with a static generator, currently Hugo is looking very interesting.