Robot Attack is a weblog theme originally developed by Opera for their My Opera service. I used to blog on Opera before switching to WordPress and I really liked their themes. After the switch I searched and searched but didn’t find a WP theme that I liked enough. Most beautiful WP themes out there are not suitable for programming blogs. So I finally reverse engineered the Robot Attack theme and converted it to a WP theme with some minor tweaks here and there. An initial version of Robot Attack for Opera is available at Github. However right now it’s far from perfect. For one, currently it doesn’t support widgets. And then, the profile photo should be changed manually.

So, if you are a PHP guru, like this theme, and want to make it even better, you are more than welcome to contribute to the project by forking it and submitting your patches.

One thing that surprised me quite a bit was how easy PHP is to read and how quickly you can become productive writing PHP code. The learning curve is so gentle that you can hardly notice it. Another surprising thing I found in WP’s codebase is that rather than passing multiple parameters to a given method, they encode all the parameters for that method in a string and then pass that in. Weird.