16 Apr 09 Arthemia Theme is irritating
I hate bad design. I don’t mean bad colours (although that isn’t pleasant I see that as styling as distinct from design). Most of all I hate convoluted and complicated things that are passed off as user-centred.
Since I was driving user-centric design ten years ago when the rest of the world was arguing whether hyperlinks should be blue or just underlined, I feel strongly about design and partially responsible for the the way design has largely prevailed in the face of technical developers and their database inhibited twaddle.
But every now and then, like this month while experimenting with some news style themes for a project, I came across Arthemia. There is a lovely free version which I thought I would try, not that I object to premium themes, we all have to make a living and theme designers should be congratulated for crafting really good looking themes and have every right charge for them. But this Arthemia theme is driving me mad. It has a custom field setting to drop images into feature stories such as this headline story and it just does not work. There is scant documentation and what there is has been followed to the letter but is just does not work – shame really. I would have bought it, but instead I am giving it a load of bad press.
the custom key should be called: Image and it must be loaded within the wp-content/uploads/… folder
Check your key and values. It works for my site and I use the same theme.
Did it , Did it and Did it several times more. I am either missing something that should be explained better or I am running a version of WP that does not support this function. Either way it became apparent to me that I could probably rebuild the theme with all the design tweaks I needed and in a way that I could operate quicker than banging my head against this particular brick wall.
It is a great theme, but life’s too short!
I use Arthemia free on a few of my sites with success, and while it took me a while to get images on headline and featured going on my first attempt (I labelled the custom field Images, instead of Image) my real gripe is that in the headline box all the text appears without formatting, including paragraphs. This makes the headline box look unattractive, and poorly made.