Zeo

Yesterday I got an email from Michael Heilemann the creator of K2, the popular WordPress theme. In the email, he asked me whether I’m interested to join onboard K2 as one of the official “bug gardener (developer)” for the theme. Unexpected? Indeed it is. Without hesitation, I agree. Which means now I’m “working” with Mike and Chris on theme.

Since most of you know, I’m pretty addicted to K2 development and its community for the past few month. You just can’t get enough of the codes and features they put in it. Moreover when I first started joining the community, the environment itself force me to learn something that I would never expect whether it’s CSS, XHTML or even WordPress templating. And I thank them for the questions, thoughts and even valuable information.

What is K2?

K2 is a WordPress modification—an advanced template—created by Michael Heilemann and Chris J Davis, created as an improved Kubrick of sorts. It won’t make you coffee, sing songs of sweet regret or sit at your bedside when you’re ill, but it might make life just a tad bit easier for you.

binarybonsai.com

I’ve already got a brief introduction on how K2 should be and its milestone before it’s going to be released as “official” which is currently still in Beta stage. The main objective is to crush as many bug that currently exists and keep it simple as possible. I agree with Mike, more features couldn’t be added to K2 unless the existing bug and glitches are fix.

So you guys over at the community or that’s already using K2 please without hesitation report any K2 glitches, bugs or “weird behaviors” which probably would make the official release much sooner.

Let’s start destroying K2

The first thing that I think I’ll be doing is to make K2 a Valid XHTML document. I cut the size of K2 in half, made Valid XHTML Transitional, with style sheet that is Valid CSS without breaking any important stuff. Making K2 as valid XHTML is easy with the help of the W3C Markup validator or Tidy HTML (most of it already been explain on my previous K2 hacks). Cutting the size into half probably will take some time and consideration. Since the theme already being burden with a very huge size of scripts probably eliminating whitespace or unnecessary comments inside the document would do. The real problem is making K2 a Valid CSS since the style sheet have a little bit of IE hacks.

For example, there are a total of 9 errors and 84 warning if you run the W3C CSS validator on K2 demo blog. Most of the warning were cause by the lack of “specify color and background-color at the same level of specifity“. The errors increases every time a new revision comes out due to the needs to support IE (IE should burn in Hell). IMHO, we should stop this IE hacks or reduce it if possible.

Can it be done?

Yes it can. But produce semantically clean markup and simple style sheets need a lot of efforts especially without tempering the current design. From redesigning and realigning the whole K2 XHTML structure as well as making it perfectly fits the supported plugins styling will surely make your brains explode into pieces. But for the time being let’s just stick with the current structuring.

Other than that just take a peek at the K2bugs and forum for updates. As usual I’ll probably share some thought on recent changes that going to be made to K2 on my side. I will also take this opportunity to learn as much as possible from both Mike and Chris from this project.

Let see how far the rabbit hole goes.

Other discussion: Zeo joins K2