It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the site giving it even a passing glance from today that the theme has been changed. I switched to the default WordPress “Twenty Twenty” theme. I added bunch of custom CSS to override the theme and make it look more like confusion has looked for the past 14 years or so…
Why? Well, I’ve been running on a home grown theme that grew as a hack of the original default theme, ether known as Michael Heilemann’s “Kubrick” theme. But it was a mess of legacy crap; HTML that predated XHTML, then was XHTML, then no one gave a shit about XHTML anymore so I stopped making sure changes validated, CSS that started with CSS1, passed right over CSS2 as far as I remember and had some CSS3, oh, JavaScript, early jquery libraries!
I was tinkering with it lately and just decided it needed a complete rewrite. I had about 500 lines of CSS and when I looked at the Twenty Twenty theme they have ten times that. Providing responsive layout and handling all the layout code generated by various Gutenberg blocks. Besides the CSS there are hundreds of lines of PHP and HTML in various template files, way more files than are in the old Confusion theme. It would be a lot of work to start from scratch, it might be fun, but it would also take me ages given the priority I assign to managing this site. So better off trying to use a ready made them.
But, I will miss the layout, the simplicity, of the old Confusion theme. I used the Custom CSS feature to skin the Twenty Twenty theme to resemble the old Confusion theme, but there is still a long way between the two. There are also a ton of things that must be broken. I hope I can work through those in the next few weeks. Ah, debugging in production! Wish me luck.