An Essential Template Review...
Recently, I stumbled upon a new template hidden deep in the recesses of the Blogger template gallery called Essential. Sneaking a new template into the gallery without an announcement is NOT cool Blogger Team! At first glance, Essential looks strikingly similar to Contempo, but, under the hood, they are slightly different.Informal testing using Google's Page Speed Insights utility showed about a 2% improvement in speed for Essential vs. Contempo. Some gadgets like the Report Abuse gadget have been moved out of the sidebar with Essential. It appears that Essential is geared toward an even more minimalist style than Contempo with less emphasis on sidebar content. Also, if you happen to empty your sidebar in Essential, the sidebar and its hamburger will automatically disappear and the content will center itself on the page. This is a definite improvement over Contempo.
Although the transition from Essential to Contempo was largely painless even with heaping helpings of gratuitous CSS and JavaScript, there were surprisingly, only a few slight snags. First, when applying the new theme, by default, certain gadgets are disabled and have to be manually re-enabled. Second, of course, is any custom CSS will be erased, so, you will need to make a backup of your custom CSS in advance of the switch. These are both common side-effects of changing themes.
In general, my custom CSS and JavaScript made the transition very well. That being said, there were some content snags that caught me a bit off guard. For one page, I am using a CSS-based pie chart with an integrated table of values that are color-coded to match the pie chart with colored borders applied to the table. The Essential template interfered with my table's CSS. It took a bit of reworking of my original CSS to accommodate the Essential template (i.e.: .graph-data .colorworst {border-left: 10px solid OrangeRed;} ...changed to... .graph-data .colorworst td:first-child {border-left: 10px solid OrangeRed;}).
Another issue that I ran across was how Essential handled pre HTML blocks. I use the pre HTML notation to display code samples in my posts and installed custom CSS to allow large code blocks to wrap and scroll. The Essential template seems to handle pre HTML notation in a way that I didn't expect and for some reason that defies description, I couldn't get the pre blocks to work the way I wanted. I wasn't able to determine if the differences in behavior were the result of a change in strict vs. relaxed browser interpretation or if there was something buried in the innards of the Essential template that was interfering with my pre blocks. And, quite frankly, I didn't really care.
Overall, I was very pleased with the Essential template. It worked reasonably well with my existing aesthetic, was slightly faster in my informal testing and had some very nice design elements that Contempo doesn't have out-of-the-box, but, there were a few very minor issues. Perhaps with a bit more tweaking, I could have made the pre blocks work the way I wanted. But, the differences between Contempo and Essential are, in my humble opinion, too small to justify any major modifications to my posts and since a quick fix wasn't readily at hand at the time of my testing, I decided to abandon the Essential template in favor of Contempo. Essential is a good template, but, ultimately, wasn't the ideal solution for my immediate needs. Good job Blogger Team!
May 8, 2020
Update
Today, I decided to revisit the Essential template and I noticed that for whatever reason the pre blocks have started working the way I expected them to work in the first place! Yay!. So, I'm now using Essential instead of Contempo!.January 29, 2021
