About:
Prokiev23 is a custom WordPress theme I wrote from scratch, utilizing many YouTube tutorials and available code examples. It has a very broken-up, overly nested template structure so I can make changes more efficiently. It’s a simple, dense type of layout that is conducive to custom post types.

I designed two plugins to go with it: a custom post types plugin based on my specific content needs, and a suite of widgets that work with custom post types and feed content into a cell-based responsive grid system. The responsive grid system is part of the theme and it takes up the first main content area of the home page.

I am now working out updates to my theme on my CodePen.

Update from March 9, 2023:
The theme is now being redeveloped on a local development server. I started from scratch and the goal is to optimize it for future updates. That means consistent naming conventions for CSS classes, trying to keep PHP conditionals contained in functions, setting up custom properties for anything that might change globally, and making as many options as possible into back-end dashboard settings. It’s slowly getting to the point where I can work on it in a more modular way, instead of as a whole site. Once I feel like that structure is there, I’ll make a support manual for myself with the template structure description, class and function reference charts, etc. I’ll make the theme and plugins downloadable here just for fun in case anyone wants to test it out and give me feedback, but it will be a crude beta version. I would love collaborating with someone on some of the finer kinks if anyone is interested, but it’s fine if it’s just my theme.

At the next rollout, I’m going to set up a page where the future updates will live.

Update from February 2, 2023:
Now I’m in the process of cleaning up the code and making sure that the theme is the theme and the plugins are the plugins, so I can continue to tweak them in a test environment and then roll the changes out as updates rather than as experiments which may or may not break the site as I’m changing it.

Previous post from when the new site went live:
I went as deep in the WordPress weeds as I could handle, and the new Prokiev23 theme is now live. It’s kind of a beta version and there are lots of things to tweak, mostly in the CSS and plugins.

My last theme was a set-it-and-forget-it type deal, and I didn’t even update WordPress for over 10 years.  My strategy with this one is different:  I’m going refine and clean up the code on a separate development install while I optimize my content on the live site.  I’m also going to write up some kind of support manual.  Once that’s done, I’ll reinstall as version 2.0.  Then I can do more targeted updates over a longer period of time and not lose track of where I left off.  I’ll be adding all of the proper aria labels, reclass any CCS that I named after animals, and replace DIVs with semantic tags.  If there is ever a version ready for public download, I’ll release that as version 3.0.

All of that goes for the plugins too, which could theoretically function outside the theme.

I’ll be updating this post as the boxes get unpacked, so to speak.  I’ve attached a gallery of all the various screenshots I could find of what geraldprokop.com and the Quelquechose blog has looked like over the years.

Original post from before live rollout:
Sometime, in the late aughts, I copied the WordPress Kubrick theme into a separate directory, and then went to town replacing code.  I ended up with the theme that I used on my first WordPress site, Quelquechose.  I named the theme “Prokiev.”

It stayed that way until 2022 when I just went with a different theme.  Then I began developing a new version as a major overhaul.  That development is still going on, and updates will be posted here.  There will be a theme page with more details once it goes live.  In mean time, this blog might be kind of wonky.

The new theme will also subsume my current landing page at geraldprokop.com so the whole site runs on the WordPress platform.  I’ll stop using the title of Quelquechose, and all my old personal blog posts will be under their own category and more or less isolated from the rest of the site’s navigation.

The featured image of this post is a screenshot of my original, Kubrick-styled custom theme Prokiev, which went finally away after my 2021 Bike Tour.

The new theme is currently being developed live at: geraldprokop.com/test