Stuff of interest to me for WordPress developers
Posts tagged Themes
Sandbox Swim Team Theme
Mar 10th
This evening I posted a new Sandbox based theme called Sandbox Swim Team. This theme is designed for Swim Team web sites. Like the LEGO and Soccer themes I have done recently, this theme is widget ready and has styling for a number of plugins I use regularly. This theme has a number of options to support custom header images, color scheme choices, and themed login pages. You can see this theme in action on the MacGregor Downs MacDolphins web site.
Sandbox-LEGO theme update
Feb 15th
This afternoon I posted an update to my Sandbox-LEGO theme. In the process of developing my CASL Soccer theme I had figured out how to do a couple things which I have wanted to incorporate into Sandbox-LEGO. It wasn’t a lot of work but I also decided to spend the time to re-write the Bourne Shell script which I use to generate CSS files for the various color schemes. Instead of duplicating a bunch of code I implemented it as a series of functions which are called with the various color settings. Fairly trivial looking back on it, not sure why I hadn’t done it in the first place. It should make adding a new color scheme much faster.
Sandbox LEGO Theme beta
Oct 22nd
Off an on I have been working on a new Sandbox based LEGO theme for a while. I wanted something I could use for my own LEGO blog as well as the NCLUG and NCLTC sites and possibly the ILTCO site as well. I wanted to make it fairly easy to customize it by selecting a color scheme and allowing custom header images.
Color schemes were pretty straight forward. I wanted to base them on the Fibblesnork Backgrounds which I like a lot. The Fibblesnork backgrounds are very small images designed to tile across a web page. In my case, I wanted to use them to frame the content area. There are 18 different colors and two sizes for a total of 36 different background color choices. At some point I plan to support all 18 colors but initially I am only offering three: Red, Green, and Blue. Setting up a theme options page to select a color scheme was pretty straight forward, I had done that previously with my Soccer Theme.
WordPress has some built in functionality to do custom header images but it didn’t really do what I wanted. I wanted to allow a fair amount of control over the look and layout of the header. I decided to support three header images: Left, center, and right. I didn’t want to manage the header images so I decided to leverage the built in media management capability.
The theme options page will present any image that is in the media library as a potential header image. But how? I wanted to make it fairly simple to use. I decided to implement a drag and drop scheme based on the jQuery UI and discussed it in detail in a prior post. It took a little while to work it all out as I had done very little with jQuery previously.
The last thing I wanted to allow was the ability to tweak the header layout with CSS. For this I added what I referred to as “CSS Overrides” for the blog title, blog tagline, and the three header images. The combination of color schemes, custom header images, and CSS Overrides allows the Sandbox LEGO theme to take on a fairly distinct look.
The theme is currently in use on three blogs, I expect to make it available for download in the next few days. There are a couple issues I know of that need some styling help and I want to get two more color schemes finished before I release it. Color schemes aren’t too bad – I just need to pick the proper values. I have a script that actually generates the CSS files.
jQuery, jQueryUI, jQuery UI widgets and theme options
Sep 9th
Over the past few days I have been dinking around with jQuery, in particular some of the jQuery UI widgets. I am working on a revamp of a LEGO WordPress theme and I wanted to allow the theme to support multiple color schemes and custom headers. This is a learning project for some other themes I want to update (e.g. Swim Team and Soccer).
For the header I wanted the user to select 1-3 images from the media library to use in the header. I also wanted to allow some styling control over the blog title and tagline and lastly choose a color scheme from a selection of 10-12 choices. All of this information would make for a very busy theme options page so I decided to make use of the jQuery UI Accordion widget to logically group information into sections.
My theme development area was still running on WordPress 2.7.1 which includes jQuery 1.6 which is not the most recent version. I should have upgraded WordPress before embarking on my Accordion experiments, I would have saved myself a bunch of time!
As it turns out, Accordion isn’t shipped with WordPress so I have to download it and install it as part of my theme and then load it. This isn’t a big deal, there are lots of posts across numerous blogs that explain how to load Javascript correctly. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work. I played around with jQuery UI Accordion and half a dozen similar solutions trying to get it to work but I could only get one solution partially working. In the end, I decided to try updating WordPress and start with the latest and greatest.
What do you know? My Accordion worked perfectly! So after wasting the better part of two days trying to work with what I had installed, simply updating WordPress was the right answer. I think the real change was in the jQuery UI ui-core component as at one point I had Accordion working in the older version but only when I loaded the custom packed jQuery download. When I loaded just the Accordion source file it wouldn’t work. The custom packed file included something out of jQuery UI ui-core, what I don’t know but it made a difference. When I looked at the jQuery code in the 2.8.4 release I noticed the ui-core component also had this function where as the 2.7.1 did not. So something was definitely different and it make a big difference.
Now that I have the Accordion working I am back to making progress on my theme options page. I have played with jQuery just a bit, this is the first real jQuery application I have worked on. It is pretty powerful, I can see why it has gotten so much traction.
Theme Collection
Feb 24th
In my quest for theme ideas, I ran across this interesting post. It is a collection of ~140 WordPress themes. The thing I like in particular about this article is the way the themes are presented. The images are large enough that you can actually see the design without having to navigate away from the article itself. I wish more theme sites did this. It would make browsing themes much easier.
Theme Frameworks
Feb 6th
I want to use a theme framework to develop a couple themes. Why do I want to do this? Because I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. There are several to choose from or I could write my own. I really don’t want to write my own.
Frameworks
I am sure there are more but these are the ones I have looked at. I had pretty much settled on Sandbox as I found it easy to work with and there was some discussion a while ago about including it as part of WordPress. I was a bit concerned that it hadn’t been updated since last summer but thought "hey, maybe it is done”. So I started playing around with it for my LEGO Blog. What is there now is very much a work in progress. I got it working enough that I could see where I was going.
Then I saw this: http://www.plaintxt.org/2009/01/looking-for-a-wordpress-brand/
Uh-oh. What is the future of Sandbox? I posed a question on the Wp-Hackers mailing list but the thread went wildly off track and it was never answered. The comments on the announcement indicate that it might end up as part of WordPress but other than that, I haven’t seen any other mention of it anywhere.
I am reluctant to invest more time in a Sandbox based theme until I know where it is headed. I guess I’ll go back and look at the others again. I really like the idea of child themes so I want to explore this some more before giving up.