A few months/weeks/days ago (you pick), I started to feel dissatisfied with The State Of This Here Blog, and wanted to get back into longer blathering stuff rather than shorter blathering stuff. This dissatisfaction was partly caused by the niggling worry that the previous theme I had used for a good 8 or 10 years, Nom Nom, was no longer supported and was outdated, being based on a WordPress standard theme called Twenty Eleven.
That theme title will tell you just how outdated the framework was, but as a technological Luddite, I disliked the whole “Gutenturd” block editing/block designing approach that WordPress took early in the previous decade.
Lately, there’s been a lot of controversy in the WordPress community (I don’t pretend to understand it). And I realized that there’s a lot of pent-up dislike in that community, by people who create websites for a living, for Gutenberg, the WordPress framework that was imposed on the pixel-stained rabblery lo these many years ago.
So after making a total botch of this website by flipping into and out of several “best recommended free themes” that I got from watching YouTube channels, I stumbled onto this one, Graceful.
Graceful is a free multi-purpose WordPress Blog theme. Its perfect for any kind of blog or website like lifestyle, fashion, travel, tech, health, fitness, beauty, food, news, magazine, blogging, personal, professional, etc. Its fully Responsive and Retina Display ready, clean, modern and minimal design. Graceful is WooCommerce compatible, supports RTL(Right To Left) and is optimized for SEO.
It’s in active development, it’s rated 5 stars, and the free version has a lot of nice features out of the box.
The only problem I had was that it was hard to set it up just using the iPhone (16 Pro, I know) and an old, old mini iPad. I needed to start my desktop, literally dust it off, and use a mouse and keyboard.
Well, it wasn’t that bad, once I had coffee at hand. There’s some more tweaks and I have a to-do list, but I managed to set up a 3 column layout again, and delete all the cruft left over from previous themes (like Lorem Ipsem blocks and weird menu blocks).
I’m keeping WordPress, despite all the heat going on in the community. But I did disable the block editor with a handy plugin.
