Solo Technology

While plowing through my BlinkList stuff (see my recent Tag Angst post), I found a bookmark for Canvas, an interesting project for WordPress. The goal is to make it easy to modify your blog without having to know PHP/CSS (and apparently WordPress Tags too). While you must use a Canvas “theme”, everything about it easily modified and re-arranged — in most cases via dragging and dropping and setting some properties. Conceptually, perhaps like WordPress widgets on steroids.

It’s time you broke the mold. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for WordPress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.

I’ll spare you my usual screenshots as the Canvas Preview page does the job just fine. Check out some of those shots to get an idea of how things work. The Installation Instructions are excellent as well.

My initial play was with my sandbox/development blog. I have to admit it was great fun to thoroughly rearrange my blog’s look and options just by dragging some little “blocks” around. It worked great! There’s still a bit of tedium involved (sure, you customized your main page, but what about the single post view, the archives list, etc.? don’t forget to do them too) but no coding at all. (You’re welcome to have a peek at my dev blog, but as time passes I won’t promise that it’ll be running Canvas.)

Next, I tossed it on my personal blog. Things didn’t go as well there. An error was displayed when I initially chose the theme (alas, I thought I screen-shot it but I apparently lost it). As a result of whatever that error was, the initial theme defaults were borked. I got most of it set up the way I wanted, but I had some odd issues with post lists — I’d tell the module to show 8 posts and it would show 2. I’d tell it to show 4 and it would show 2. Bit of a trend there and I couldn’t seem to get past it.

I’ve not figured out how to change the very topmost section of the theme. And that bugs me. I’ll have to check the forums for that I suppose. It doesn’t seem to be accessible via any blocks.

For now, this remains on my “watch and see what happens” list, but the potential here is simply huge. With some strong early adopters and more “canvas’able” themes to play with the fresh pursuits fellas might have something big on their hands.

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