If you think you’ve seen this theme before, you probably have. Mandigo is one of the more popular WordPress themes out there. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s incredibly flexible and reconfigurable: the theme-specific control panel seems to go on for ever. On the other hand, the colours (there are seven to choose from) are all a bit garish, and the various glyphs and icons are much more intrusive than I like. So I’ll play with it a bit: come up with my own title image, and maybe tone down some of the visuals.
One feature of Mandigo that I really like (and which ought to be part of the base WordPress system) is that you can define your custom header and footer code and Mandigo will inject it where appropriate. This keeps the base theme PHP files uncluttered. One of the things that I had to remember to do whenever I installed a new theme was to cut the Google Analytics and Amazon Associates Javascript from the footer of my present theme and paste it into the new one. Usually this is obvious (it goes in footer.php), but some theme designers skip this file, and simply include calls to the WP footer function in various places. Mandigo gets this right.
I still wish that I knew what was broken in the Breaking News theme. Everything seemed to be working except for single post display. Moreover the failure mode was hard to debug: the WP engine just failed to respond. Since it was an out-of-the-box failure, I’m guessing that it was a subtle incompatibility with WP 2.6. Breaking News is one of those themes that I mentioned above, where the designer refactors things in a way that diverges quite a bit from the standard WP patterns. This approach is always liable to expose some unexpected (or unintended) dependency.
UPDATE: That’s better – a clip from my favourite picture of Tommy makes a nice header.