Why I’m Ditching The Graphene WordPress Theme

One of the reasons I love using WordPress to manage my site is the massive number of customization options out there for the software – between plugins providing specific extension capabilities to the site experience and themes allowing me to quickly and easily find a look and feel that works for me as a base to tweak and make my own.

Since sometime in (I think) 2013 I’ve used Graphene as the theme here on Xadara. It’s a rather amazing theme for WordPress which I honestly thought would be the be-all end-all for theme options on my site. It just worked so perfectly right “out of the box” and provided far more depth to customization than I would expect without having to go in and straight up edit the core code myself. Yeah, some aspects of it were a bit overkill, but once I got accustomed to how it behaved, I found it to be just perfect for me.

Well, that’s actually not been the case for the past few months off and on for about the past year. For starters, we have the fact that when launched version 2.0 of the Graphene theme actually killed my website, as well as the sites of others using it! Needless to say, that’s not the greatest sign when your flagship overhaul of a theme completely obliterates the sites using it! Reverting back to the old theme and waiting a little while for updates did fix the issue, but man, that’s pretty bad.

Then came another problem – things just didn’t feel right. There were little issues here and there, call them growing pains of Graphene 2.0 if you wish, but there was a pretty big issue – the in built ad display code just wasn’t working right. Oh, it would show ads, yeah, but if you updated it, those updates wouldn’t take!

Yeah, it’s hard to explain, but for whatever reason, no only the ad code but many other elements of the theme simply refused to actually update properly – attempting to save resulted in reversion. Deleting the content worked, sometimes, but posting it again resulted in it sometimes taking, but not working, or for some reason going back to the “old” form… it made no damned sense.

I posted on the Graphene support forums about this, to get nothing more than a reaction of “I cannot replicate the problem” (or something to that effect) and, effective silence following that. Not even so much as a “hey, we will look into the code and see if there’s an issue we can find.” or anything.

Now, you may ask why I would expect them to go through the effort to check things and see if there’s an issue – perhaps the issue is on my end? Sure, maybe, that’s a valid thought save for one fact.

Graphene stores all settings in the database of the WordPress install.

Now, I’m not an expert on databases, but I do believe that if you can still edit other options, makes posts, and otherwise have a functional, living blog, then the fact that a given segment of code will not update properly may have something to do with the theme software rather than the site itself since, you know, this is all the SAME database file.

That’s like saying you can write on a piece of paper EXCEPT for this one block, that’s no different than any other spot, but writing to it simply doesn’t happen. That makes absolutely no sense, but that’s what would have to be happening were the issue on my end.

I wrote about that issue, and the mistake I made fixing it, in an article late last October.

Now, Over the past year, things haven’t been as bad – Graphene has continued to evolve and I’ve generally been happy. I still haven’t gotten the ad situation solved, so I just switched to another method (which honestly I’m considering changing soon anyway, given how oddly intrusive it seems to be) and on a whole, I’ve been content – Jetpack, a plugin that I consider critical to running a good WordPress based site, and some other plugins has been its own thorn in my side at times, but on a whole, things have been good beyond the ever-present “hey, this just won’t update” issue.

That is, until the past week or so.

I published an article on the MASCOT lander on the asteroid Ryugu. In this article, I shared tweets from the official account to make things more simple, rather than me re-phrase such easily shared information.

The tweets looked fine in the editor, but when I published the article, they were oddly spaced out – massive blocks of empty space dominated, which can even be seen now if you’re early enough to see this article (read, it’s still the 23rd of October in the US.)

I wondered if this was an issue with my formatting, or if it was something more. Nope, my formatting was fine, it’s Graphene. The way I found this out was the case by temporarily switching to another theme I happen to have on the site (a “just in case” backup option) which sure enough displayed the post fine, with proper spacing.

Changing the theme on Xadara tonight. I love Graphene, but I'm tired of it always behaving oddly. The fact for some reason it now no longer spaces Twitter posts shared on the site correctly is the last straw.

The one with gaps is Graphene. The one without is what it should be. pic.twitter.com/BTT6tPIs5h

— 민일성 (@Kurisu_Yamato) October 23, 2018

That’s it. That’s the last straw. I could post about this on the forums too, but why bother? At this stage Graphene had reached a point where I just couldn’t trust it to be a reliable element of Xadara. I love so much of what it does, how it worked, how it felt to edit things, but when I can’t expect even something as basic as formatting to work right with a common media embed type, forget it. I’m not in the mood for any more surprises.

To that end, I’m going to be taking time tonight to transition Xadara over to the new theme. This is going to mean losing quite a few things, and it certainly will not be an easy transition (at least for the work I have ahead to polish up everything) but either I do this or run the chance of things just getting worse and worse.

Don’t get me wrong, Graphene is the single best theme I’ve ever used, but when things like this seem to be happening on the regular, I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve got to move on and honestly, I kind of miss the way things used to look around here. The more compact text of the pre Graphene 2.0 theme, among some other aspects… eh… I’d say it’s time for a change.

We’re going into a new “frontier” tonight, shall we say. 😉