Get yours now!.

I find a lot of S9y and a lot of all sorts of other blogs using Kubrick these days. I guess it is still “cool” for users of other blogging tools, since it wasn’t the default style/theme. I have seen at least one blogging tool for which it is (one of?) the defaults, too. So the gallery should be useful to all kinds of users.

The WordPress 1.5.1 Photoset is now ready for the world to see.

The WordPress 1.5.1 Slideshow looks really good, too, especially when you get to the menus and stuff.

Please feel free to highlight areas and add comments that highlight the various features if you will.
I might get around to it ultimately. Flickr’s unique way of adding comments by selecting portions of the picture might be very useful in creating documentation that describes the UI, too. The process of uploading those pictures and organizing the pics in the correct order took too long for my comfort. The tool Flickr provides to rearrange the photos in a set do not display the filenames, and the thumbnails were too small for me to be able to distinguish one from the other. Minor gripe.

Work in Progress…

P.S. Don’t you hate it when someone links to pages the way I have above – where the anchors to the links tell you nothing about the words? I do, but I couldn’t resist posting a bunch of links real fast.

I can’t give you names or details since I don’t know German. They are look smashing good, and elegant, for the record. They are designs that will fit right in with version 1.2.x, but will work with v1.5beta as well, with a little tweak here and there.

Way too simple for some tastes – but not mine. This is clean, white and unspoilt, for those who prefer the color white. Nice work. We need some clean themes in addition to the ones with chutzpah, don’t we?

So that’s another theme for you, folks.

This one’s neatly done in brown, and shades of grey. The search field at the top left, and the American Flag at the top right, as well as the buttons to “home” and “top” at the bottom right are interesting touches. The theme is released under a Creative Commons license. The theme is a two-column template. The author seems to be using a three-column version for his personal blog.

This one’s called HeadSpace.

I hope there are more base themes, like Kubrick, and more customizations of the themes in the future. Designers should get a shot in the arm with the new template-based design option in the forthcoming release of WordPress.

The Quicktags available in the WordPress “Write” menu has button for both these tags, ins and del.

In a previous post, I edited the content to reflect some changes. I wrapped the new text, which was “μ , where μ (MU) stands for Multi User. Hopefully, it will soon be available to the public.” within a set of <ins> tags. Now the question was as to how to style this to show my readers that this text had been inserted later, after the post had been originally published.

By default, everything within an ins tag pair is underlined (and for del, the text is struck out).

I did not want the text I inserted to be underlined, since that would look like a link. So I wanted it changed to an dotted underline. Also I wanted to say “(Updated)” after the text so people would know what there is a dotted line, and so that everyone notices that there has been an update.

To change the default underline and create a 1px dotted underline, I used the following in my css stylesheet:

ins {
text-decoration: none;
border-bottom: 1px dotted;
}


To insert the text (Updated) after the relevant portion, I used the following in my CSS stylesheet:

ins:after {
content: "(Updated)";
}


The CSS 2 specification says one can use :before or :after to insert the text before or after the relevant portion. The spec also mentions that several different values can be inserted. I inserted a string, i.e., (Updated).

What is remarkable is that when I first searched google for ins tag css text, I ended up at a WordPress Support page!

Adding rules for the del and ins tags in your stylesheet, and using the tags responsibly can make for a better experience for your readers.

If you find the collapsible menu items in the menu on the right in his weblog, he provides details on how to implement the collapsible items. You have his permission and his stylesheet too.

The modified styles come with an accompanying modified index.php and fix the problem where, when the menu section is longer than the content section, the footer section does not behave as expected. To see what I am talking about, see this example – scroll down to see the problem where the menu spills over, below the footer.

The improved design comes with screenshot previews. Take your pick.

It would be useful if the exact changes that needed to be made to index.php were outlined clearly, so that users who have already modified index.php can edit it, instead of getting this new index.php and adding their customizations one by one.

Read the announcement, and see the styles in action.

Feel free to use the stylesheets, should you like the styles.

Adding an image to your RSS 2.0 feed is known to be perfectly harmless, and can add some color and jazz to your feeds in the feed-readers’ display. Of course, the effect is entirely cosmetic, but heck, if you can spend hours modifying the design of your blog, why not spend a few minutes modifying how your feed is displayed in readers, considering the fact that a lot of your regular readers might be using a feed reader?

To add an image to the RSS 2.0 feed created by your WordPress weblog, create an image (the maximum value for the width and height for RSS 2.0 feeds are 144 and 400 respectively), upload it to your wp-content folder, which is intended to hold all user-content, and edit your wp-rss2.php file/template to include the image. Change the permissions of the wp-rss2.php file to 666, and you can use WordPress’ in-built template editor to do the editing.

Here is the relevant portion from WordLog’s RSS 2.0 feed :
.
.

<channel>
<title><?php bloginfo_rss('name') ?></title>
<link><?php bloginfo_rss('url') ?></link>
<description><?php bloginfo_rss("description") ?></description>
<image>
<link>http://wordlog.com/</link>
<url>http://wordlog.com/wp-content/feedlogo.jpg</url>
<title>wordlog.com</title>
</image>
<copyright>Copyright <?php echo mysql2date('Y', get_lastpostdate()); ?></copyright>
.
.


Now, the wish has come true! You can have Michael’s design for your blog too.

Kubrick for WordPress is his attempt to

create a theme which is simple to setup and use, while remaining powerful and versatile.

I am not linking to the download file directly since I would like you to visit his site, read the readme, and download the theme.

Joen, Brian and of course Michael are WordPress users from Denmark, who have, at some point of time, been colleagues. It is good to seem them all interested in improving WordPress.

I like to think that it started with his comment/question, which goes :

How does someone convert their default layout to a two column, centred layout, with a footer, and using float from CSS 1?

At that time, I thought it was too detailed a question to be included in the FAQ, as I beleived the chances of someone actually voicing that question would be rather low. Kudos to Root for having gone ahead and answered that question now.
Two designs are available,

1. Two column – Gemini
2. Three column – Trident

He has a detailed explanation of why he thinks the changes are neccesary at the pages I have linked to. Read them and use the templates if you like. I agree with him about that fact that for new users who require a template with a header, a footer and two or three columns, those templates are good to get started with. If you decide to use them, know that you also have to get the index.php provided , along with the stylesheets.

WordLog uses a modified version of Root’s creation. So if you need to create a two column design, with a header and a footer, and with an Image Banner, you could use the WordLog stylesheet. In addition to the header, or banner, image, a change I made was to increase the width of #rap, #content and #menu to about 800, 600 and 200 pixels respectively.

In other WordPress design news, with regard to the anticipated release of Kubrick, Michael has made it known that it should be available by Saturday evening (CET).