These days there is little doubt that eating organic meats, fruits and vegetables is a healthy choice. Organic growth in your software might not be so healthy though.

This blog is powered by WordPress, and like most software that has the ability to have it’s look and feel customized / skinned I suspect at some point you were stuck with what the original designers wrote. This same pattern can be observed in FireFox, Windows Media player, WinAmp, etc. All of these products had theme support added in later.

There is of course a right and a right-er way do accomplish this addition.

Take WordPress for instance. With WordPress you create a new theme by making a folder in the themes directory and put your custom pages and css in there. Clearly there was some thought into this as it is logical to use and easy to implement and deliver new themes.

Contrast this to TikiWiki which I am trying to theme-ize to get it to the same look and feel as the blog. To create a new theme you have to create >my_theme<.css which goes into styles folder. Layout templates are stored in themes/styles/>my_theme< and some information is turned on through the many geek switches in the admin console (such as the site logo). This means there are at least 3 different places to change things in order to customize your site. (And there may be others I have not yet found).

My point is this. It is not sufficient that a product meets the letter-of-the-law requirements. In this case both applications can be themed, but one is far more straight-forward and easier to use. Where does your product line up? If it is like WordPress, then congratulations. If however it is like TikiWiki, log into your bug tracking system and create the bug. Now.