Hide - the Jekyll & Hyde Theme, WordPress Edition

Hide - the Jekyll & Hyde Theme, WordPress Edition Featured Image

The evil art of appending CSS code.

Unfortunately CSS has a tendency to be endlessly appended, especially in large codebases and lazy or underfunded devs - this usually spells bad news for future development and a full refactoring is soon in order!

However, appended CSS has it's time and place and this is one of them...

A WordPress.org "Twenty Fifteen" theme modification to look just like "Hyde," a fantastic theme for Jekyll (another website/blog software somewhat like WordPress).

Problems

A love for simplicity and minimalism can be a rare commodity in development nowadays, yet it's especially important in programming - it's always the answer for long-term gains - and WordPress really doesn't fit that bill, in an ideal world I'd be statically-generating my blog propagating it onto some robust CDN edge nodes right from git in the command line - serverless style.

Jekyll is a great software to do just that, statically generate beautiful sites and blogs - and it has an even greater theme called "Hyde" by @mdo which has been infamous in various development communities.

But, the world is rarely ideal, and full of buzz-words - so I've settled with encouraging productivity with WordPress, for now...

WordPress themes can be a nightmare for dependency issues, customisation and excessive loads of bloat - and after shopping around I couldn't really find any free and open themes that were simple enough but also scratched the itch just like Hyde does. Although, the WordPress.org "Twenty Fifteen" comes close in a somewhat ugly second place...

Solution

A few moments and ~100 lines of CSS code later, and we have it.

The beautiful design and typography of Hyde with the simpleness and bloat free upstream stability of "Twenty Fifteen".

Slap these ~100 lines into the 'Additional CSS' section of the Customise Theme UI in WordPress and you've got yourself a Hyde WordPress theme, simple and updatable without too much additional bloat or breaking changes down-the-line.

https://github.com/hozza/Hide-Jekyll-Hyde-Wordpress-Theme

At the time of writing this blog benhoskins.dev is using my new "Hide" theme (...more of a mod than a theme really).

Check out "Hide, the Hyde theme WordPress Edition" on GitHub.

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