The Future of Thesis OpenHook

I finally upgraded King­domGeek to The­sis 1.6 — I’m rather late to the game, which might sur­prise some of you.

Truth is, I’m no longer much involved with The­sis at all, for a vari­ety of rea­sons which I don’t really care to go into at this point. How­ever, I still have the Open­Hook plu­gin, which I’m not about to aban­don. I have some ideas to improve Open­Hook, but if I’m going to push for­ward with it, I need to do so using the lat­est The­sis code­base. (Inci­den­tally, the lat­est code­base totally nerfed the cus­tom styling I was using… so we’re back to default for the time being. I really dis­like that I now have to over­ride col­ors. I dove into The­sis because it was min­i­mal­is­tic and easy to style; now I have to do half my work in a cus­tom style sheet and half of it in the lay­out panel… Sim­plify, sim­plify, simplify.)

I upgraded King­domGeek because, against all com­mon sense, I pre­fer to do my devel­op­ment here. I do this for two rea­sons: King­domGeek isn’t my pri­mary source of income, so down­time doesn’t kill me. Also, you users are far more likely to catch cer­tain gaffes that I may take months to find, if I ever do. In other words, many eyes are bet­ter than two. Oh, and yes, I real­ize my nav menu looks ter­ri­ble. You can still click it, though; go ahead, don’t be afraid… You’re mak­ing it self-conscious now.

The next ver­sion of Open­Hook, I hope, will greatly improve user expe­ri­ence and effi­ciency. I plan to rewrite things from the ground up to make the code sim­pler and sex­ier — in the spirit of The­sis itself. What this means is that I will be poten­tially nuk­ing all of your cur­rent Open­Hook cus­tomiza­tions (that’s one of many pos­si­ble bugs I’m envi­sion­ing in this sce­nario…). In other words, when you see an update noti­fi­ca­tion, don’t dive head­long into it. Check feed­back on Twit­ter first — it’ll either be praise or curs­ing for @KingdomGeek; take that and decide whether to upgrade or not when the time comes. ;) (Yes, I do test my code, but like I said, bugs slip by me. I’ve not attuned my per­fec­tion­ism enough to be a great coder.)

So what will Open­Hook have in the future? (And this is future… Don’t expect an update any­time too soon.) Well, there are a num­ber of things I have in mind (maybe I’ll finally ajax­ify things a bit?), but the big win that I have on the top of my list is sand­box­ing. On more than one occa­sion I’ve heard of users mak­ing some mod­i­fi­ca­tions only to dis­cover their blog is screwed up. Fatal errors are the pits, and I’m hop­ing to set up Open­Hook to pro­tect against fatal errors. (Lesser errors are still wholly your responsibility. ;)

Now’s the time to drop fea­ture requests, though. I’m a bit out of touch with the The­sis com­mu­nity — I don’t have the time for it like I used to, pri­mar­ily — so let me know for what you all have been long­ing, ‘kay?