Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

I recently updated my themes, and since that time a change has been made in trunk in how pagination is handled. All 3 three themes have been updated for this change. I will be leaving download links for the previous versions up as well, as I believe those versions should work with 0.4.1. If you experience any problems with either version, please set me know.

Downloads and more info on each theme available on their original post.

• swanky
• mzingi
• Harvest Field

Also, I have a demo site up and running to check them out. I still need to tweak the themeswitcher plugin so you can only select certain themes from your theme directories, so note that only my 3 themes have the switcher code.

I’ve been quite lazy (or busy, you decide) lately, and have been meaning to update the 3 themes I’ve released to work with the latest trunk. Previously, I kept decent todos and a svn repo for mzingi, but this time I simply bore down in some late night frenzy and got everything up-to-date. I’ve got a new svn repo to work with, and will check them in at some point in the next few days, and hopefully will be able to better outline any changes.

Basically the changes to mzingi were minor, just a few code changes for things like atom links, and updating the YUI fonts and style sheet. I also added some styling for draft posts.

As far as swanky and Harvest Field, they have more extensive changes, most evident in the sidebar content. Harvest Field now only uses built in code for the footer content – the about, recent comments and more posts links. The sidebar in Harvest Field is entirely plugin reliant now, sans the search and subscribe link. It supports by default the Twitter, linkoid (for aside like posts - which is also excluded from the more posts offset) and the very nifty blogroll plugin. All three have their own templates in the theme. I also added support for the credits due plugin, with a built in page template, and conditional code in the footer. Also, I borrowed the watermark for draft posts from michaeltwofish’s connections theme, and a little more emphasis on comments in moderation styling.

Swanky was also updated to use the current Twitter plugin/template, as well as added support for the blogroll plugin. If these plugins are not active, nothing will show, nothing will break. Recommended plugins are listed on the themes page. As with Harvest Field, the draft watermark and comments in moderation were addressed.

As usual, if you find a bug, or would like to see something added/need help, please leave a comment either on this post or the original post for the theme in question.

So without further ado :

• swanky
• mzingi
• Harvest Field

Also, I’m putting the finishing touches on a demo site, which I’ll be adding links to the aforementioned theme posts. Just need to decide how I want to add the theme switcher code (I’m trying to decide between adding a new fixed element at the top of each theme, or simply adding the dropdown to each sidebar).

As always, much thanks go to the community for the help and assistance in putting these together.

Edit Twitter, linkoid, blogroll, and credit due plugins can be downloaded from Habari extras

Second Edit To clarify the “Credits” feature is accomplished by 1)activating the creditsdue plugin from extras 2)create a page with the slug “credits”, you can add additional content to the page if you want 3) there is no three (I’ve always wanted to say that!).

Update: New versions now available. See bottom of post for details.

Wanting to work on mzingi, I found myself a little unmotivated, so instead, I thought, maybe I can find an open source design to port to Habari, and that would get me motivated to look at the underlying code. So off I went, googling, and browsing the many repositories of open source designs, looking for something I might want to use on a personal site, and would be a nice (albeit one of few currently) available themes for Habari. I stumbled upon styleshout, and their numerous, well done themes. Ideally, I’d liked to have found one that hadn’t been ported to other platforms, but Harvest Field so caught my eye, I couldn’t help but choose it.

It just had enough fall feel to it, that I set about converting it to Habari. I wasn’t enamored with the semantics, and set about using the mzingi markup and code, tweaking for design specific features, which include having asides in the sidebar (tagging a post “asides” will leverage this feature. The tag can be changed in theme.php), recent comments in the footer column, the user pic and about content you can add via admin/options and editing your user, as well as a new twist, the next 5 most recent posts in the third column. The nifty part of this feature is that it leverages some Habari internals, and shows you the next five posts if you go backward in the page view, ie page/2 will show you the next 5 posts from page 3. This is dynamic in the sense that if you are showing 10 posts per page, as set in your options, then it will show posts 11-15 in the footer. (I will be documenting how this is accomplised in the Habari Wiki soon. Special thanks to Andrew da Silva for the help on this feature).

Another feature is the dual colored Blog title in the header. This is dynamic, in that it counts the number of characters in the title, and does a little math to split it up. You can change it manually by either editing the number it divides by in theme.php, remove it in header.php and use the default Options::out('title'), or manually add your title wrapping the section you want in light brown in span tags. Special thanks to Chris Meller for his assistance on this “feature”.

Future goals are to better style the pagination below the posts, any other suggestions are welcomed.

I had originally thought about adding a plugin hook in that column to pull a RSS feed, but I eventually thought twice about requiring an external plugin. You certainly can edit footer.php to add any type of content you desire.

As always, feedback is welcomed, and I look forward to providing more Habari themes.

Download Harvest Field 0.2

For users of trunk >r1574

Download Harvest Field 0.3.1

Demo

The original design was released with a Creative Commons license (I really need to blog about that), so I haven’t really addressed a license, suffice to say, do with it want you want code wise, just respect the original author’s wishes.