This is in Leicester Square, the same day as the Trafalgar Square photos, and in my mind now I am picturing why I can shoot comfortably with the Fuji X100 range of cameras in a way that I can’t with other cameras.
Now I could have got closer like in the crop, but I like the original framing with the man looking on, and the man at the back looking at other drawings.
Part of being comfortable with the camera is that it has its own case and strap, so I don’t have to have a bag with me. That makes me feel more relaxed because I am not balancing the bag on my shoulder.
Second is that the lens hardly sticks out at all, as you can see in this photo looking down on the top plate.
And from the front, I think the camera doesn’t look like a modern digital camera that means business.
Long before I changed to the Twenty Twenty-Five WordPress theme I am using now, I wrote a post that was simply a log of the themes I was using so that when I changed theme I had a record of previous themes.
I entitled the post ‘Do Not Publish This’ so that I would not mistakenly publish it.
Now I want to publish it, so I changed the title to ‘Publish This’.
The log records that the theme as of 11 October 2021 was Rebalance
Before that for about an hour, I used the Cerauno theme
Before that, Maywood – and changed back to Maywood Oct 2021
And then I changed to Glen on 28 Nov 2021 and kept it until I felt that I wanted to get familiar with Block themes and changed to the Twenty Twenty-Five WordPress theme at the beginning of 2025.
I thought I might be able to find the exact date I changed by looking in Jetpack / Log, but on my level of paid plan the log doesn’t go back that far.
Happily, a Happiness Engineer kindly told me I changed on 11 January 2025, so now I know the exact date I changed.
Block Themes Versus Classic Themes
What distinguishes Block themes is that any changes you want to make are done via the theme blocks themselves.
With classic themes, you make changes via the Customiser.
The Customiser is a step away from what is going on at a deeper level. The Customiser is pre-built by the designer. It abstracts certain information – such as font sizes or the menu options – and gives the website owner the ability to make changes to them.
But if a particular facet of the theme – such as the size of the header or the footer – is not in the Customiser, then you can’t get to it.
Full site editing with Block themes bypasses the Customizer interface, which means you are working directly on the layout. It feels like someone’s idea of a maze when you first start (when I first started) but it is not that bad.
When you click on Themes / Editor you see a list of things you can change – Styles, Navigation, Pages, Templates, and Patterns. Really, you can change anything and everything in the theme.
Here is a screenshot of the Templates interface and from there you choose what you want to edit. And if you mess it up there is a reset button. Yay! for the reset button.
Mimimalio Classic Theme
So, with that background, via a circuitous route I came across the Mimimalio theme today in the WP.com repository.
And it is a Classic theme, not a Block theme.
The Glen theme I was using before the Twenty Twenty-Five theme was a Classic theme and it has been retired. So how come there are new Classic themes in the repository?
The Mimimalio theme looks to have been added to the WP repository about 22 months ago and it is available to Business plan subscribers in the WP.com repository.
WP.com is promoting Block themes – so why are they adding non-Block themes?
I guess the way to look at it is that WP.com is in a transition phase, and has not completely shifted to Block themes.
Read around and you will find that some people much prefer working with Classic themes because they are easier to use even if there are some things you cannot do with a Classic theme.
And WP.com has to accommodate them. The question is, for how long?
My guess is that WP has to work on making Block themes so easy to work with that people will take to the switch easily.
But WP is not there yet by a long chalk.
By A Long Chalk
“By a long chalk” is a 19th-century British idiom that comes from pub games, where scores were chalked up on a board, and a long mark or a “long chalk” meant a clear winner by a big margin.
When I walked down from Leicester Square and came across this man carrying a placard, I didn’t think anything more than that he was an evangelist.
But when I came to Trafalgar Square, there were thousands of people there for the story of Easter being played out on a stage with a huge screen showing the action on the stage.
