Quiet before the storm
This is a very brief post comprised almost entirely of bullet points. Briefly:
- All my existing themes, excluding the Sandbox, have been updated.
- These themes are available as “pre-releases” on their respective Google Code sites:
- These releases should work with WordPress 2.0.x and 2.1. Both.
- Please download and test them. Then let me know what I screwed up.
- I will call them finished when I’ve found enough errors in them to satisfy me.
- Then I’m going to update the Sandbox. Promise.
That is all. Thank you for your time.

Scott wrote:
YAY!… commencing download.
Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 4:08 pm ¶
philippe wrote:
thanks, scott, plaintxtblog is working like a charm.
Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 5:09 pm ¶
Steve Ole Olson wrote:
I’m very happy with plaintxtblog v3!
Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 7:36 pm ¶
darius wrote:
Everything works perfect in ‘blogtxt v 3.0′ theme.
By the way - thanks for adding option to resize images automatically in the posts and positioning blog in the center of browsers window.
thanks!
Posted 11 Feb 2007 at 9:21 am ¶
LJ wrote:
Scott:
There’s only one problem I see with veryplaintxt v.3: italics have to be hand-coded. Otherwise if button clicked, they appear as bold.
LJ
Posted 11 Feb 2007 at 9:50 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey LJ: Actually that’s on purpose. Read the readme.html that came with the theme files.
This is more of a user-end issue. Because I consider
<i>italics</i>to be different than<em>emphasis</em>. The latter relates to the content, whereas the other is for presentation. If you want text to appear in italics, use<i>; to emphasize text, use<em>.Now if you want emphasized text to appear in italics, that’s another issue all together.
Posted 11 Feb 2007 at 11:42 pm ¶
Stephen Collins wrote:
Scott, I’m hammering away at a Sandbox skin to reskin my site and blog, and could really do with the latest code to see what’s going on. Any chance I can get at it?
Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 1:32 am ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey Stephen: The changes to the Sandbox won’t be sweeping by any measure. Some small changes here and there and mainly it will be cleaning up the markup. So your skin shouldn’t be affected by the updates.
And, frankly, I haven’t gotten around to making them yet. I will, though, and very soon.
Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 9:56 am ¶
adam wrote:
i love the new screenshots for the first 3
Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 1:28 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Any ideas for the screenshots for plaintxtBlog and Simplr? I kinda drew blank on those two and reverted to using actual screenshots. Yawn.
Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 2:13 pm ¶
adam wrote:
actually, i think simplr works as it is quite well. dunno what to think about PTB. i’ll kick it around tomorrow or something.
Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 2:42 pm ¶
Andy wrote:
Actual screenshots may bore you but the reason the WordPress themes page uses them is to help the user. A pretty picture of something else is anything but helpful.
Posted 14 Feb 2007 at 10:18 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
I agree in principle to Andy’s statement. But if the image represents the essence of the theme, well, there’s something to that as well.
If someone finds a theme they like, downloads it, and then uploads it, I doubt they’ll get to the Presentation screen and decide not to use it upon seeing an image that isn’t a literal representation of the theme. But then again, they might.
Posted 14 Feb 2007 at 10:46 pm ¶
Seamus wrote:
Hi I’m trying out Barthelme v.3 and think it is great. However I can’t seem to get page list to recognise the page order I’ve coded? I’ve looked at the php code in sidebar.php and changed it, to ’sort_column=menu_order’, which I thought would sort it, but it did not. I’m using your sidebar / widgets so I tried disabling the widgets and that sorted my problem (with my code change), but obviously I’d like to use widgets. I’ve looked at the code in functions.php and I can’t work out the problem (I’ve a very basic understanding). Any ideas? I’m using WP2.1
Posted 15 Feb 2007 at 5:04 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Seamus: I just sent you an email. You’ll just need to find a widget that displays pages by page order. Check out widgets.wordpress.com as a good starting point.
Posted 15 Feb 2007 at 7:56 pm ¶
adam wrote:
agreed with what scott says.
i understand that on shared hosting environments (wp.com) those screenshots aren’t helpful persay, when the user’s already taken the time to download the theme, a descriptive, branded image is more useful than a minutely scaled screenshot. [c.f. the usability arguments against snap preview].
a selectively cropped image can tell you something about the textural qualities of the theme, the element styling (lists, links, menus, etc.). a scaled screenshot can give you a blurry guess at the relative color palette of the theme.
(relative, because scaled and compressed images will distort the actual colors).
Posted 16 Feb 2007 at 12:41 pm ¶
adam wrote:
p.s.-
andy, i see that all your wp.com themes in svn include bg, text, and link colors as variables. putting those variables onto the theme switching page would be far more valuable than normalizing screenshots.
Posted 16 Feb 2007 at 12:45 pm ¶
Seamus wrote:
Scott: many thanks. I’m now using Navey Road’s widget called folding pages and it now works great. Thanks for the quick bit of advice - it takes ages to find something that’s not there!
BTW I really like this pre-view function you’ve got for posting - if possible could you give me a reference for it?
Thanks again..
Posted 16 Feb 2007 at 6:22 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey Seamus: Glad that you got it sorted out.
The plugin I use for the comments is called Live Comment Preview. It works pretty well, but I can’t speak for its WP 2.1-compatibility. Yet.
Posted 17 Feb 2007 at 7:09 pm ¶
Seamus wrote:
Thanks Scott I’ll give it a try and hopefully report back.
Posted 18 Feb 2007 at 2:01 pm ¶
Seamus wrote:
Scott: Well back sooner than I thought Live Comment Preview seems to work fine with Barthelme v.3 under WP 2.1 with no adjustments.
Posted 18 Feb 2007 at 6:30 pm ¶
Edward wrote:
I have a few errors but not to the point where i couldnt fix them.
Posted 19 Feb 2007 at 1:20 pm ¶
zia wrote:
Hey Scott,
Once uploaded, both blogtxt and simplr say they’re missing their stylesheets. I’m on 2.0. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Posted 21 Feb 2007 at 6:13 pm ¶
zia wrote:
Never mind; I’m an idiot. It’s beautiful!
Posted 21 Feb 2007 at 6:35 pm ¶
zia wrote:
Scott, thank you thank you thank you. I have been wanting an easy-to-use three column template ever since I started using Wordpress a year and a half ago. This is the first one I’ve found that actually works. And I’m amazed at the amount of thought you’ve put into this–the little things, like noting default settings, as well as the big ones, which alas are far too technical for my simple little mind to grasp.
I do have one question; perhaps you can guide me through this if you have the time. When I click on the categories or the archives, it displays a truncated version of the post. How can I change it so the whole thing displays?
Thanks again,
zia
Posted 21 Feb 2007 at 7:44 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Hey Zia: You’re welcome you’re welcome you’re welcome. Glad you like the theme.
As for the excerpts appearing on archive pages, you just need to replace
the_content(...)withthe_excerpt(...)in the following files:archive.php
category.php
search.php
And possible some others I’ve forgotten.
That should do the trick. Let us know how it goes Oh! and if you do do this, please be good to the hAtom microformat and delete the class
entry-summarythat appears in thediv directly abovethe_contentcall, as leaving it would be a non-semantic—if that’s even a word.Posted 22 Feb 2007 at 12:17 am ¶
Ben wrote:
Hey scott, don’t know if you are busy at work with Sandbox 1.0 but just wanted to relate a hack I’ve been putting in recently.
I’ve been adding a tag to the body class of single posts and pages with “id#” where # is the WordPress post ID. I’m not sure if you have adressed this in you next release but it allows for total control of stylesheets for a specific post. On a recent project I needed to have the header be enlarged on just the first page. By adding this tage you could concevably have a custom stylesheet control over any part of a specific page.
I know there is a post specific page number tag farther down, but for some purposes, like the one mentioned above, it just didn’t work.
I thought you might be interested. I assume it should probably be an “id” tag, but I am not great with php. Thanks for the great work. I am in love with Sandbox.
Posted 13 Mar 2007 at 3:09 pm ¶
Scott wrote:
Ben: Actually that’s one of the improvements we’re putting in. There will be a couple other new
bodyclasses. Off the top of my head,.protectedis one new one.Posted 13 Mar 2007 at 8:14 pm ¶