Why I Started Looking at Another Theme
I had been using the Volantis theme ever since I started tinkering with my blog near the end of last November. It looked polished, offered plenty of built-in tags, and that was exactly what drew me to it in the first place.
But starting in March, I ran into a frustrating problem: after Baidu indexed one inner page of my site, it didn’t pick up a second page all the way through late June. I compared my blog with others in a similar space, and aside from the usual factors—such as not having a top-level domain or not being satisfied with my own article quality—I also began to suspect that the theme structure might not be especially search-friendly.
Blogging should be a fairly pure and simple thing, but it’s still hard not to care whether your work is being seen. That became one of the reasons I decided to try a different theme.
Why I Chose Butterfly
Once I made up my mind to experiment, I looked through several of the more popular Hexo themes.
Sakura had actually been on my list since last year, but now it feels a bit too fancy for my taste. Next is obviously one of the classic Hexo themes, though I can’t even clearly remember why I didn’t choose it back then.
In the end, I went with Butterfly.
Comparing Volantis and Butterfly
Visual style
From a UI perspective, Volantis and Butterfly are not dramatically different. I prefer a cleaner look, so the first screen of my site ended up being very similar under both themes.
Of course, both themes allow customization on the homepage, so this similarity mostly comes down to my own preferences. The sidebar and article layout are also broadly alike, though each theme still has its own style.
Code structure
When it comes to code structure, there’s one thing about Butterfly that I personally like more. On article pages, for example, it lays out a lot of page information very neatly at the top, which makes the content feel more compact and centralized.
That said, Butterfly’s theme configuration file feels less tidy than Volantis by comparison. In some places, there are even more comments than actual config items, and the overall layout doesn’t feel as concentrated.
Built-in tag support
This is one area where Volantis clearly felt more convenient to me. It has a rich set of native tags, while Butterfly supports fewer out of the box.
That became obvious during migration. I had to go through articles one by one and modify things like gallery and psw. On top of that, the two themes differ a bit in their front-matter syntax, so the migration took quite a bit of time.
Customization
In theory, both themes are highly customizable. The reason I’m bringing this up is really more about my own situation than the themes themselves.
When I first started exploring Volantis, I was still very new to static blogs. I had asked plenty of beginner questions that were already answered in the documentation. Later, when I began tweaking the look of the site, I borrowed ideas from other people’s work and also received a lot of help.
When I moved to Butterfly, some of the habits I had built up with Volantis made the switch harder than expected. Even after the migration was mostly done, I still hesitated for a few days over whether I really wanted to replace the old setup. The problems I’m facing now may be simple ones, but despite trying many approaches, I still haven’t solved all of them. That part is on me.
Things I Still Needed to Sort Out
~~① The two themes use different LeanCloud statistics paths. In Volantis, the URL written into the structured data is domain + path, and the count unit is times; in Butterfly, it uses only the path, and the count unit is time. I also tried modifying the path, but couldn’t get it right.~~ Solved manually.
② Butterfly currently does not support site-wide UV and PV statistics through LeanCloud. If I switch to Busuanzi for counting, then all the stats would have to start over.
③ Sidebar customization. Although Butterfly provides a richer native sidebar than Volantis, Volantis supports multiple display styles. Butterfly allows HTML-based customization, but at the moment custom display is not supported on article pages.
~~④ Using Font Awesome. I replaced the bundled CSS with the Pro version, which caused the title icons inside articles and the copyright declaration icons to stop displaying correctly, even after I changed the corresponding content.~~
⑤ Dynamic friend links. One especially practical feature in Volantis is that friend-link data can be stored in issues, so adding a new link does not require regenerating the whole blog. Someone has already ported this functionality, so I may add it later.
~~⑥ In Artitalk, even when the front-matter included comment: false, the comment box still appeared.~~ Fixed: in the Butterfly version, this needs to be added in the front-matter section of the config file.
A Few Final Thoughts
I didn’t write this to declare one theme better and the other worse. This is mostly a record of my own ongoing trial and error, and also a reminder to myself that I still need to learn more if I want to solve these problems properly.
If it happens to give someone else a useful point of reference while choosing a theme, that would be great too.
In any case, I’m grateful to the people I’ve come across along the way who shared their experience and offered help, and of course to the developers behind both themes. Open source is much more interesting because of people like them.