new WordPress theme and PHP version

My second pointless project today, after spending the morning messing with bookmarks and browsers, was to find a new theme for this blog, and update the version of PHP that I’m using.

I’ve been using the Stargazer theme for a long time, and I’ve been really happy with it. But it hasn’t been updated since 2018. And I’ve started getting PHP errors on this site. I also noticed that I was running PHP 7.4, and should probably switch to 8.0. Doing a little testing with that revealed that Stargazer definitely would not work with 8.0. So I decided it was time to upgrade to a newer theme.

I tried out a few free themes from wordpress.org and wordpress.com. I didn’t find anything that was quite what I wanted. After trying a bunch of stuff, I’ve settled (for now) on the Twenty Sixteen theme. Twenty Sixteen is, of course, the default WordPress theme for 2016. I tried out a couple of the newer ones, but they weren’t right for me. Twenty Sixteen has a right sidebar, a header that doesn’t look too bad, and a fairly clean layout. I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it, but it’s good enough for now.

After installing it, I upgraded my PHP install to 8.0. That seems to be working fine. So at least now I’m running a recent PHP, a recently-updated theme, and a fully up-to-date WordPress.

I’d really like to switch to something a little more customized, but this is good enough for now.

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