New Message: Bell's Themes No Longer Available?

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A new message was posted:

Address: http://frontier.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$14546

By: ken tompkins (ken at loki.stockton.edu)

I have, for some time, been concerned about the lack of new themes for Manila. I say this not merely because of the older designs but because many of them still use tables instead of CSS.

I have, however, kept as large of a selection as I could maintain. Students really like to individualize their sites; one of the biggest complaints I get each term is about a favorite theme not being available or about the lack of any new themes to try.

This morning I was setting up a class theme and chose one of Bell's designs. What I got instead of a page with the theme shown was a page with year-old postings and Google ads.

Apparently, the pages where themes were displayed to see if they were what was wanted are gone. Here is what I got for the Moveable Manila:Blue theme:

http://theme42.weblogger.com/

So, here's the problem -- for those of us who are academic users (I may be the only one left!) -- I will have to remove every Bell theme from my listing. This will leave me with very few choices.

Would it not have been better if Userland had asked Bell to maintain the web pages he had, or, better yet, to employ other artists to design new themes? Surely something should have been done to prevent this.

(Just recently I installed WordPress MU and found that there are over 300 themes available!)

ken tompkins
richard stockton college of nj

This is a Manila site... http://manila.userland.com/.