AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
WordPress broke the Twenty Eleven theme two days ago, by adding an auto-loading ‘infinite scroll’ on the home page of the blog using this theme.
I hope they fix this over the weekend… I really do… I don’t care any more cause I found another theme that I liked. 😉
The main issues about the changes this new ‘feature’ in the theme brought:
- The footer area is now NOT accessible in the ‘home’ page.
- The site stats are now infected due to the ‘infinity’ feature. (home page stats are inflated)
- There currently is a tiny non-opaque footer at the bottom, that when reached will no longer scroll down to hide itself like it should.
- This ‘feature’ is not optional.
Why was the footer area so important?
The footer area was the only consistent place to put widgets:
- The sidebar does appear when viewing ‘home’, ‘categories’, ‘tags’ or ‘calendar’ pages. Giving an ugly resulting layout when there’s only a few short posts showing and the sidebar is very very tall.
- The sidebar area does not appear when viewing single posts, ergo the footer area IS important. It is (was..) the only consistent place to put stuff. The reason for this? probably the one mentioned above — ugliness with tall content in sidebar.
- The footer area does not appears in the home page.
- The footer area does appear when viewing single posts and ‘pages’ (ie the about page).
- The footer are does appear when viewing ‘categories’, ‘tags’ or ‘calendar’ pages.
Did you catch the problem? both the footer and the sidebar appear when viewing ‘categories’, ‘tags’ or ‘calendar’ pages! If I was to have the same widgets on both areas, then it would be really cluttered when viewing those pages.
This was why I had originally chosen to utilize the footer area for all the widgets and disable the sidebars. The footer was consistent, it appeared on every page — bar none — and I could use it to have a consistent setup of the blog.
Old/New Theme
How the previous theme used to look -- minus the sidebar, I had all the widgets at the footer area
So, I changed to a new theme, as you can see.
It feels awkward, but kinda cozy…
The links widget is now gone, replaced with a Links page instead.
This theme’s footer areas (5 of them) are narrower and some of the widgets didn’t fit there. So I decided to give a sidebar a try… at least it’s consistently displayed in all pages/posts/views in this theme (unlike Twenty Eleven).
The Tag Cloud may have to go too… TBD.
Update: they finally added an option to disable the infinite scroll. Dunno if I should change back or not. I will, for the moment, take the easy route of not changing back.
Got-fu? 
Hi there,
I use wordpress for my blog as well, and recently noticed the issues you are talking about in this article when trying to set up a wordpress blog for a friend. After much reading and playing around, the best way to avoid these issues is to host your website through another provider (I use 1&1) and NOT wordpress. Using another theme is only a temporary solution, as they plan on rolling out infinite scroll to all WP themes at some point in the future.
WordPress only allows you to get custom appearance features when you buy the $30 upgrade, but that is ONLY for changes to the css. In other words, if you want a customized template for a particular type of page, that’s written in PHP and you would not be able to use it for your site (an example on my site is this page, I had to create/code the template myself and add it to my theme: http://kelseats.com/sf-restaurant-reviews/)
Also this means that you can’t use/edit plugins from the wordpress.org community.
BUT if you host your blog on your own hosting provider, all of these things are possible, You get full access to the css/php for every template and every plugin. As far as sidebars, I use a plugin called WP Custom Sidebar that literally allows me to create a customized sidebar for every type of page, or even specific tags/categories, on my whole site.
Hope that helps, feel free to email me if you have questions!
Kelsey
I’m aware, I have used a self hosted one for a while. Hosting one here removes the administrative headache involved with some of the minutia, like stats/spam control/etc. Moving back to self-hosted is gonna become sweeter if they break all the themes like that tho.