But WordPress is not a Jedi yet. Not quite. It’s quite a bit better than the last time I tried to implement it. For the most part, it was easy – the separation of style and function is superb. There were a few things that were frustrating about it, like the fact that it’s somewhat unclear what each part of Kubrick does, and where it is or is not implemented.

Which leads to my biggest complaint: the search form. The form appears to be implemented both in searchform.php and in wp-includes/widgets.php, inside the wp_widget_search function. Unfortunately, this means that in order for the search widget to be styled in the same way as the search form in searchform.php, a file outside the theme must be edited, deviating from the separation. This means too that I can’t simply back up or package my own theme without a patch to the base installation. I suppose I could write my own search widget, but as I don’t know the first thing about this, I can’t do anything about it right now.

Suggestion for the WordPress devs: find some way around this. Perhaps you require themes to implement the search form in some standard way, then implement this as the default form in the search widget. Perhaps you can keep two separate forms, but both should be maintainable as a part of the theme.

Outside of this one complaint, it feels like WordPress is a very well-polished piece of blog software. I look forward to using it and experimenting with various parts of its functionality. I’m going to categorize any future posts on the subject in ‘wordpress’.

Signing off…