This blog has used a myriad of themes over the years.
All created by me, all “blank canvas” variations. I would take at most the underscores wp starter, but more times than none, I’d use my 10+ year old n4n0 starter kit (minimum basic files for the theme to register, plus a css reset and a less -> css parser).
I’ve never liked the bulk, or the lock-in that off the shelf themes bring.
At work, I have to follow what other designers decide and it’s usually much more complicated than what I like.
So in my personal blog styles, I tend to overcompensate and reduce everything unnecessary to the point of absurdity, I basically didn’t have a website of my own for about 10 years.
Design changes, but the general theme is, only add what I believe is critical, remove everything else.
Part of this is my desire for minimalism, but the other part is that I am just rather lazy and use this website as a personal blog, so what I care most about is just writing content.
I do not care about the code of my website, as crazy as that sounds for a web developer.
I like to play with code things… A lot… My public github has a fraction of things I build in my spare time. Most of my projects are private, most are prototypes, unfinished experiments.
I almost never write anything using WordPress in my free time. Let alone for myself, for my blog…
WordPress used to release themes yearly for a bit and I always tried them, to see what they came up with, just to keep up with the times.
I never really felt like what they came out with is worth actually using.
All the themes felt just too restrictive. Until this one.
Twenty Twenty-Five blew me away.
It feels like evolution on the block idea, still restrictive in many ways, but it’s good enough… It’s good enough for many things.
I’ve actually built a few quick websites for friends and colleagues using it.
I’m (at the time of this post) using it for my personal blog.
The block editing interface is a joy to use with just enough customisation to satisfy my needs…
Well, almost. I wanted to try something tricky and hit a wall.
I want/need conditional statements (basic if checks) like we can do in php and that’s simply not a thing in the 2025 theme.
What I wanted to achieve was to have the first post, the latest post of the blog show an excerpt, but all others should only have titles.
While this is technically possible by setting homepage as a basic page with a custom layout which looks exactly like the blog post homepage/query loop and then linking to the actual archives from it… That’s not what I want.
Another alternative approach was to show the excerpt everywhere (in code), but then use css to hide it everywhere except the first post of the homepage. Still, not quite what I’m after.
This little annoyance is not enough to make me abandon this theme, if anything, it’s something that I want to play with.
I’m considering building a mini custom plugin, which expands functionality and adds things like custom post types and other minor improvements.
This theme did the impossible… By introducing a zero code approach, by creating an amazing interface to achieve nearly everything one would want in the editor, effortlessly…
It made me care about the code of my website again.
It made me want to write custom code again.