After getting the stylesheet to about 75% of modifying "Vier" I realized to actually fix some of the issues I need to just copy it and make a new theme based on Vier. It isn't that I can't do it completely with CSS, it just requires some really convoluted styling to get it to work the way I want. Which also means if you're using keyboard nav the focus jumps around because the elements are no longer being shown in the order they appear in the HTML code.

It's much easier if I can just rearrange the HTML so I don't have to have convoluted CSS. Another issue is that to get that nice 3-column layout in Vier it needs to be done with fixed positioning and negative margins. I can't use a flexbox on it because of the page architecture. But if I make a new theme I can create a custom layout that does let me use a flexbox. On top of that, Vier still uses server-side device detection that conditionally loads a "wide," "narrow," or "mobile" stylesheet. My responsive layout is sort of fighting against those. Lastly, Vier does not have a "schemes" folder like Frio. You can't just drop in a new sub-style and have it available in the theme drop-down. You actually have to hard code it into the theme options.

So the simpler solution is to just fork Vier and make a new theme that doesn't do server-side device detection or conditionally load stylesheets based on that, won't require anyone to hack theme files to add the option of this layout, and lets me customize the actual page architecture to make the layout work properly and the tab order to be correct.

This won't be as complex a customization as the "BookLook" theme I'd been working on, a lot of ideas from which are now baked into the core Frio code. This is just to get around some minor issues with modding Vier's layout to look more like Mastodon or Bluesky.

But it does mean I likely won't have this ready for people to try before the Release Candidate becomes the Stable version.