Claude, take the Theme Editing Wheel!

I’ve been using Talian 1.0 as my WordPress Theme since 2008. Credit to the company VA4Business and Steve Arun for creating it. It was a good theme then, and compared with all the visual eyesores of themes these days, which all just look the same to me with gliding animations everywhere, I always was loathe to replace it. However, time marches on. PHP vulnerabilities march on. WordPress deprecates old functions that old Themes depend on. But modern LLMs know every manual page of every open source project that have ever existed. WordPress is, without a doubt, the most used website software in the world, by far, and it’s also open source. Theme files are just .zips of PHP, HTML, and CSS (maybe a few more) that can be uploaded to an LLM.

Therefore, here’s “Talian Modern” which Claude put together for me over the course of a few hours of chatting. It retains almost all the appearance of the original Talian, except it’s adaptable to sizing – no more being locked in a thin bar in the middle of a modern widescreen. If visited from a phone, it will smoothly resize itself down. The photo “rotate system” at the top of the page has been completely redone so now it can handle much larger image sizes, and also read EXIF metadata out of the photos and make that metadata appear when you mouse over (or tap/click on, if on a mouse-less phone or tablet) the image. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.