Apr

Problems with the Mandigo WordPress Theme

Filed Under blogging, wordpress seo, wordpress themes

I’ve found a couple of problems with the Mandigo WordPress theme I’ve been trying out. I decided, at least for the moment, to stop using it, and change themes again. I was using Mandigo 1.19, SEO’d by mytypes.com, but then I decided that the newer version of Mandigo was a better choice. Of course, I always get myself into trouble when I do that.

There was no SEO’d version of the latest Mandigo theme (1.32) available at mytypes.com, so I did it myself. Out of the box, Mandigo 1.32 has some of the SEO features already in place, but some of the theme architecture made it difficult to make the necessary changes without rewriting the theme.

My concern was that altering the theme too much might make it difficult to upgrade later, as well as additional time and testing. Mandigo looks rather high tech, and has some cool features, including the ability to easily add widgets before and after “the_content” rather than just in the sidebars. It also has some ability to easily add HTML code snippets in various strategic places.

Still, I found some problems with the Mandigo WordPress theme in addition to the above. One issue was that the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin wasn’t working. When the plugin was activated, comments wouldn’t display. I ended up installing Ultimate Google Analytics instead.

Another problem with Mandigo was that it displays “by author name” after the title of each post. That’s fine. I figure that even though I’m a one author blog, it would get my visitors used to seeing my name. But, the link to the author pages was throwing a 404 file not found error.

After some thought and effort (including changing the theme a bit, and messing around with the author concept within WordPress themes in general), I decided that another theme might be better.

I had already seen both Blue Zinfandel and Cutline, and I liked the clean look of both. I like the high tech look too, but I thought that maybe a cleaner, less high tech theme might be better at this point, especially considering the current look of the main site.

Although I know that Cutline has been claimed to be SEO friendly, there is no version that I could find from mytypes.com. I decided to go the “easy” route and use Blue Zinfandel, which was already SEO’d by mytypes.com, and is a nice, clean, airy theme.

So, unless I find a major problem with the Blue Zinfandel theme, I’m going to stick with that, at least for a while. A couple more plug ins and some minor tweaks and I’ll be good to go.

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