Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
One of the caveats of using themes authored by others is that you don’t quite know how things are set up. The reason that this has come home to roost for me is that I was trying to change the title of a widget last night and was wondering why it wasn’t filtering through to the blog pages. I went for a spot of googling as you do and it dawned on me what might be going on. The plug-ins used by the Andreas09 theme are defined in its functions.php file and I was being scuppered by naughty piece of hard coding in there. If it was using the standard widget from widgets.php in the wp-includes directory, then everything would have worked as expected. A quick spot of code porting resolved the issue and all was well again.
What this has to do with WordPress.com is that they seem to have encountered the same problem and fixed it using what could be viewed as a more ham-fisted approach: deleting the widget functions from functions.php for Andreas09. This would have meant that the default widgets shone through, thus explaining the changes that I had seen and why my nice categories listing now grabbed less attention. I reckon that my more surgical approach is the better one: at least, I still have my categories looking how I want them…