So what’s new with these themes? Why the update? Well, WordPress 2.1 came out and I just needed to update my themes. After working with Andy on the Sandbox, I learned a great deal—including understanding what I’d done wrong in my other themes.
In the themes mentioned above, the following improvements have been made:
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Better accessibility
- Just like the Sandbox, actually; check out the source for the specifics
-
Cross-browser consistency
- I checked screenshots for many browsers, browsershots.org
-
Better Widgets support
- Now each theme loads its own widgets, so the default sidebar content can be recreated entirely with widgets
-
Dropped the theme toolkit
- Just chose to write my own theme options menus
-
hAtom support
- Implemented the hAtom 0.1 schema, which is a good thing
-
hCard support
- Now post and comment authors get hCards
-
New version notification
- When a newer version is available, a notice will appear
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Option for comments on pages
- Again, re: Sandbox; see included
readme.htmlfor details
- Again, re: Sandbox; see included
-
Print styles
- Simple, but effective; could easily be enhanced with a little work
-
Standardized special classes
- These special classes will work across all my themes
-
XHTML Transitional DTDs
- Dropped the Strict DTD to make themes more resilient and hardier
Working on revising all of these themes taught me a whole lot. First, the thank-you roll call for those who helped me (in no particular order at all):
- For the new version notification script, thanks goes to ceejay.
- For helping make the Sandbox and teaching me heaps, thanks to Andy.
- For being a good fellow-WordPresser peer, thanks to Adam.
- For always being around to test, a great thanks to Rick.
- For the image generating PHP script in Barthelme, thanks again to Andy.
- Thanks for the file icons go to Mark.
- Thanks for the feed icon go to Matt.
But there are a few things I wanted to mention specifically for each theme. Try downloading the themes and giving them a spin if what I mention here doesn’t make sense. Now the specifics:
-
Barthelme
- Custom header option, much like Kubrick (see thanks above)
- Option for enabling an author byline (for multiple vs. single author blogs)
-
blog.txt
- Nine different layouts possible: two 2-column and one 3-column each with three alignment options
- Option for enabling an author byline (for multiple vs. single author blogs)
-
plaintxtBlog
- All the layout issues with IE 6 in the previous version are fixed
- Improved markup (and still the minimal of minimal themes)
-
Simplr
- Improved banner navigation links with “Skip to . . .” links
- Now features its own Simplr Recent Comments widget
-
veryplaintxt
- Banner navigation links appear when sidebar doesn’t
- A great update, which aims only to improve the same old, same old
Now I await your input.
27 Comments
“Dropped the Strict DTD to make themes more resilient and hardier.”
Please could you go into more detail on this decision? I always go out of my way to convert themes to a Strict Doctype and am disappointed to hear you’ve dropped it. I don’t see how using Transitional markup would make the themes any more resilient or hardy?
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200609/no_more_transitional_doctypes_please/
I agree with Sam (#1).
All the other changes sound great, but going from Strict to Transitional XHTML is a pretty big step backwards.
I get several emails every week from users who report problems with their sidebars dropping off. It’s always a problem with the WYSIWYG (Rich) editor putting in invalid (deprecated) markup that causes the layout to fail.
This is because with a Strict DTD browsers are more intolerant of invalid markup. Remember that these themes serve the widest base of users possible.
Using a Transitional DTD keeps these errors from breaking the layout.
In Mr. Berea’s post above, he’s mentions HTML 4.01 Transitional DTDs, not XHTML 1.0 Transitional DTDs. If I thought placing a Strict DTD would change even 1% of users habits when it came to writing markup in their blog posts, I would.
would simply involve changing the first line of the header.php file. You both sound rather dramatic about this, like I’ve destroyed these themes, which is frankly ridiculous. There isn’t any “Transitional” markup in the themes and they are otherwise 100% Strict DTD compliant.
I’m just trying to help the end user. You guys seem like you know what you’re doing, so just change that first line in the header and you’ll be set.
That’s great news, thanks. I didn’t mean to suggest that your theme would require much editing, I know from experience that the markup you produce is great.
The only reason I asked, was for more detail regarding the decision. The bug causing sidebars to behave strangely justifies it completely and I agree with your choice. Bloggers using the WYSIWYG editor would run into trouble with any theme I think.
I’m sorry if I came across as dramatic, I’m sure the quality of the themes won’t be affected in the slightest.
It’s no big deal, really. Thanks, Sam.
The change in DTDs isn’t something I did lightly, and it really was to benefit the majority of users. Just think of how much deprecated markup WP is enabled to put into the themes. And just think of all the different widgets out there, all the code snippets that users throw into their themes, etc.
The only reason to use a Transitional DTD is to allow
iframeor presentational markup, e.g.,s,u, which I’m not a big fan of. Check out the readme.html’s in each theme. I am trying to help users use markup more semantically.But I had to be practical given the varied uses of these public themes.
Dramatic? You’re calling me dramatic? Well, I have NEVER in my LIFE …. ha ha, kidding!
Yeah, sorry about that. I’m a bit of a standards nut so I just thought I’d pose the question as well.
The code in your themes is so clean it’s practically poetry, so trust me when I say that it was not a complaint.
Thanks again for your hard work.
Cheers,
DG.
ps: Including the hCard microformat was a really nice touch!
If you want to see something really slick with the hCards, plugin your plaintxt.org theme-powered URL into the Technorati Contacts Feed service. Note how cool this could be with a page full of comments.
Scott: if I might make a small suggestion for the next release- please turn off anything that changes the case of the text I put out. Worst-case, make it an option. IF I WANT MY TEXT TO SCREAM I’LL DO IT MYSELF, THANKS.
I mention this here, rather than just fixing it myself and letting you go on your merry way, because modifying the text seems directly contradictory to your stated goal of “offer[ing] themes that showcase your content, not my design skills.” If your theme modifies my content (AS IT DOES BY MAKING IT SCREAM) then it steps away from showcasing my content and towards showcasing your design skills.
Aside from this little nitpick, I’m completely in love with your themes- they truly are about my text. Congrats on being able to do such great work, and thanks.
(I should have mentioned that I use plaintxtblog, but I think I noticed the same thing in at least one other of your themes.)
Hi Luis: Thanks for your comments, but the all-caps for headings in plaintxtBlog and for the main title in blog.txt and veryplaintxt will stay. Apologies. I’m no designer, but I’m definitely a qualified typesetter.
And actually modifying how the text appears is different than modifying what it says.
It seems you might benefit from using the Sandobx theme where you won’t be bothered with my “design skills.”
And I find it hard to believe that anything in any of my themes SCREAMS, but to each their own, I suppose.
I had thought that, at least since Joyce and Cummings, it was understood that capitalization was part of the potentially idiosyncratic tone and content of a piece, and not a mere tool for typographical clarity. But I’ll defer to your expertise and obvious design sense- I’m just a hacker and law student
Thanks again for your awesome work, even if we’ll likely just have to agree to disagree on this very minor particular point.
Ah, I see. I hadn’t anticipated my themes being used by Joyce and Cummings.
I had a look at your blog, by the way, and I see that you might be talking of the
strongelement. Remember:strong= “shouting;” andb= bold.strong(emphasis) does not denote any particular decorative styling, except for those that browsers have been telling us.hehe. I don’t claim to be either, but I do think that 100+ years post-Joyce, it is fair to say that idiosyncratic capitalization is used more broadly, particularly on the internet. The caps-lock-is-screaming standard is particularly broadly held.
I was originally writing in reference to your handling of the entry-title class, but I did notice the em/strong i/bold distinction shortly afterwards. Speaking purely from the user experience perspective, it is a little odd that in the default wordpress editor there are i and b buttons- which actually use em and strong respectively. So users using your theme and the default wordpress editor will expect i/b (indeed, see it in the pseudo-WYSIWYG editor), but when they hit publish they’ll get your em/strong effect. I don’t see a good way around this; I think your argument about em/strong is at least defensible, and I’m pretty sure the theme can’t make the editor have em and strong buttons. So… dunno. Anyway, just chalk this up as an observation about what lots of users will expect v. what they’ll get when using the theme.
And, again, in case I’m not being clear- these are fairly minor nitpicks. I otherwise just love the incredible level of thought and attention to detail you’ve put into the various themes here. If you didn’t strike me as a serious and thoughtful person who cares a great deal about their output, I wouldn’t be bothering to try to have the discussion and change your mind.
Two other things: (1) I see that you’re in Queens. I’m in Morningside Heights; I’d be happy to buy you a beer some day. I’ll bring my SO; you can swap PCV stories. (2) The ‘Scott’ link on plaintxt.org seems to go to a different place than the ‘Scott’ link in the plaintxtblog theme; if that is intentional, ignore, but otherwise I know that is one of those little details that it is easy to forget to change everywhere, so I thought I’d point it out.
Hey-hey! Another city dweller. I had a good pal that used to live over on 125th and Amsterdam. I know the area. That might be fun.
You know, I have had quite a few people who have written to me saying something just along the lines of what you written, that WP confuses b and
strong, so I’m kinda shooting people in the foot.I think I’m going to post about it this weekend and see what the consensus is. Stay tuned.
I’d be interested to know what you think of this Scott:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/02/26/a-design-pattern-for-image-and-figure-alignment/
It seems like an idea worth experimenting with. As Chris says, perhaps a late edition to the Sandbox release?
the thing that annoys me most about chris’ post (other than the absurdity of his anti-semantic argument for a instead of left), is that he doesn’t reply to comments. ever. it’s worse than a blog with no comment form, because at least then you know that you’re talking to a brick wall.
which is why scott’s post is so much more interesting. it’s a dialogue.
I read Chris’s post and I think he’s on to something. When I reflected on the class names (I should toss in ’semantic’ I suppose) based on
.figure-x, I thought something more appropriate might be specific to the type of image being used, e.g.,Futhermore, each of these could be appended with a presentational class like
img-smallorimg-largethat could control its size, e.g.,It looks like this might be going a bit overboard, i.e., too many classes which could conflict with one another. And granted that two of the classes directly above would be called “presentational.”
But it seems to me that semantic information for an image would be presentational. Otherwise, I think scripts picking up the
altattribute (producing a caption, etc.) might be the way to go. But if it’s scripted, it’s probably not going to be explicitly semantic.Who knows!
And @Adam: thanks for the kind words. I find it funny that you mention that I’m more interactive with my comment threads, yet how many Sandbox issues have I yet to address? He he he.
i don’t find in ironic, since you’ve actually put out 5 themes, rather than whining about everyone else’s. and you’ve at least got an open dialog about your themes.
i think
figure photo, etc. are good, although they don’t necessarily confer styling. the ones, like .left and .right that need styling are necessarily presentational, which i’m ok with.i do find it ironic that i stopped back into the comment thread here based on chris tagging this post in magnolia
back to the post at hand, i was looking at using the silk icons for a theme, but it seems that they’re not GPL, despite their inclusion in dozens of themes. drupal has some nice ones that i might switch to… what are your thoughts?
I just checked the famfamfam Silk icons site, and those icons have a CC Attribution license. While not GPL, I think the license is fine, and the attribution is explicitly in the included
readme.html.But those icons are pretty good, actually. And I really like Drupal, its community, so maybe in a revision I’ll include them. Thanks for pointing them out.
RE:
<em>and<strong>I’d really like to de-clutter my site and become standards-compliant, but I don’t want to edit hundreds of previous posts to remove those default WordPress tags.
Is this something I can adjust within the CSS or elsewhere?
Hi Dave: The
<em>and<strong>elements have nothing to do with WordPress, except that it’s convinced many people they equal italics and bold, respectively, by labeling them so in the WYSIWYG editor.I can understand not wanting to go back and edit all your posts, but I’m not sure that you would. I think this issue is getting lost on most people.
To remove the styling of
<em>and<strong>, just search the style.css file for these two elements, and then just delete those declarations.Any word on the updated Sandbox?
I’m messing with a skin and just want the updated code. I’m well aware that the changes will be minimal, but it’s been a while since the others were released. I’m more than happy to help get it inot the appropriate state for release if you need a hand.
I’d really love to implement one of these over the weekend. Ideally I’d make a hybrid between the Hemingway theme and your blog.txt theme. I may be in touch again!
Scott, your theme is fantastic. And thanks for explaining how to get rid of that strong situation… i hear you on the reasons, but it seems built into WP to rewrite your own code back to strong… but it’s fixed now. Thanks!
Scott, is there a way to enable sidebar on single pages too, like posts, pages.
I’m talking about veryplaintxt theme
I’m trying to figure out how to insert small image logos on either end of the header title, in the veryplaintxt theme. I think this would be a very useful hack, since newspapers prefer this theme, and most newspaper covers feature these little logos on either end of the name plate.
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