transmothraLook out for my B.U.T.T.! I’ve just finished uploading some tweaks to make the Big Urgent Wish theme a little nicer. Please, as always, wear your helmets, and let me know if anything falls on your head. I could always use a good laugh.
I hope to have a sanitized version available soon.
The B.U.G. hunt is on! See if you can find all the problems with my new layout… I’ve already identified the ugly 3rd-tier dropdown menu thing on the navbar at the top, but I haven’t had much time yet to test everything out. fixed Later tonight I’ll tweak it and try to get it to behave itself a little better. Please post your comments here (be sure to include your OS/browser). And thanks!
(Things are bound to be a little on the messy side for a few days while I convert this thing over to the new theme.)
EDIT: Yikes! Single posts & pages are also totally unstyled! fixed
This is the color chart I made for orchestrating and managing the background images/colors when using both a style switcher and a browser sniffer to determine which background, exactly, to display for each area of the page. You might even find it useful for your own layouts. The key is below.
Note that the header isn’t really used, and that the content and sidebars (sometimes), and the drop-downs, post meta-data, and my-own-comments boxes (always) use the same background CSS (once for each subtheme).
In all there are 6 × 3 = 18 different CSS inserts for what ended up being one of 4 types of user agents (1. browsers that cannot handle PNG transparency, 2. browsers that can and receive special message A, 3. browsers that can and receive special message B, and 4) all other user agents).
So, yeah, you can tell that this is becoming a bit of a logistical nightmare for me! Nevertheless, I’m pretty confident that once I’ve got the thing done, it’ll be easy to extend.
I’m trying to make the learning curve for anyone else as shallow as I can. Here’s how it breaks down for anyone wishing to add their own subtheme:
styles.incsniffer.inc
header.php so that cookies don’t retain old style names (there must be an easier way to do this; maybe someone will come along and improve this step so it’s automated; nevertheless, it currently only requires inserting the style names into two lines of existing code, towards the top of the page)Not too terribly bad, I think, all things considered.
Key:
| (A) | header |
| E | navbar |
| B (+C+D) | content |
| (C+D) | sidebar |
| F+G+H+I | contrast |
| J | comment1 |
| K | comment2 (alternating) |
Haven’t been feeling 100%, so I’m working on making my own WordPress theme from scratch (though I’ll admit to scraping a little code from other themes). My current theme is called “Big Urgent Wish 2.0”, and it’s based on another theme, but i’ve decided to reuse the name and call it 3.0. This one will be a three column layout.
It’s coming along flamingly so far. It looks beautiful and has tons of really tasty hover effects. Works very well in Firefox, Opera, and IE. It’s a plush, spacey theme, with burnt oranges, ambery peaches, and velvety browns.
I’m also planning on having it support style switching, Widgets, and all of the plugins I currently use. AJAX is under consideration as well.
This will most likely end up being my first public WordPress theme.
I’ve just finished posting the latest tutorial: HTML Beginner’s Course pt 1. This tutorial covers basic HTML formatting and some common tags. Nothing intensive here, just a crash course in what it is and what it does, with a little bit of the fundamentals. Topics to be covered later include lists, images, links, tables, and CSS.
Get your feet wet now, we’ll be doing some fun diving soon enough! There’s even an RSS feed to the tutorials pages, so you can keep up with the latest tute’s.
Using Rob Ballou‘s Styleswitcher, the previous version of which i used on my last site, i’ve uploaded a new PHP-driven stylesheet-switching system. You can see on the left hand side that there are now options for the color scheme, the font size, and the font face (serif or sans-). I also changed the default from a black background to a white one to make it look a little less like a 13-year old Marilyn Manson fan with some design potential did it.
Not very friendly towards IE6-, but IE7 is around the corner, and you should be using a better browser anyway.
Cleaned up a little bit, tweaked out the CSS, and created some image galleries.
cleaning up the layout a little bit. no more yucky slowdown in IE: i figured out that IE doesn’t like to repeat a background image, at least one with transparency, too many times; so instead of using the smallest possible denominator of pixels to show a grid, i simply repeated the pattern within the image itself a few times. in this case, i changed the grid to vertical lines; but where i might have liked to use, say, 2×1 pixels to repeat across the element, i used something like 2×75 to reduce the overall repeats. not sure why this strange behavior isn’t better known or more widely documented, but i may have to experiment with it more in the future.
also fixed a couple of positioning errors on my part. the sidebar isn’t the most consistent, because some of my sections there have heading elements within list tags, while others don’t, possibly owing to different plugins having been created for different versions of WordPress, or for different themes, and so on.
I’ve re-positioned some elements (see navbar on top) and re-colored some text and images. Hopefully it will make the site more functional and readable, although there are still a few little bugs that i’m none too happy about. But until browsers are 100% standards compliant, i’ll have to learn to live with at least some bit of rendering lousiness. Some of it i can clean up and tweak; as for now, it’s off to bed with me. I’m too tired to make any links at the moment, so good night, and i hope you like the layout a little bit better.