Everything updated. Again.

March 16, 2008 – 1:39 am

Ahead of the release of WordPress 2.5.x on Monday, March 17, 2008, I’m releasing updates to all my themes. I tested both the version 4.0 and 4.1 releases of my themes with WordPress 2.5 and none of them had any problems. But I thought this release was a good opportunity to do some housekeeping.

Barthelme, blog.txt, plaintxtBlog, Simplr, and veryplaintxt have been upgraded across the board to version 4.5. New features include gravatar support, i.e., get_avatar(), and prettifying theme options menus with the new WordPress 2.5 design scheme.

Most of the revisions are under the hood, so users are unlikely to notice any cosmetic differences. The theme options menus now each use wp_nonce_field() and filter content much aggressively than before. So users should rest easy that they are using secure and stable themes. I mean, these themes are each almost two years old.

The Sandbox has also received an update, which is necessary since its inclusion with the core has been pushed back (again) to WordPress 2.6. So be it. Anyhow, the Sandbox now has some improvements to its semantic classes, including new classes for parent and child pages.

As always, I encourage everyone to have a look, give them a spin, and feel free to come back with any comments, suggestions. Enjoy.

By Scott | Posted in News | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Trunk users beware

March 2, 2008 – 1:20 am

Half an hour ago I committed a number of WordPress 2.5-specific changes to the Sandbox SVN. And thanks to a much improved Google Code interface, you can see the changes for revision 226.

This means if you using the Sandbox /trunk/ with WordPress 2.3.x and you svn up, well, you’re going to get some errors. Apologies.

There are also a number of new classes for the body: body.page-parent, body.page-child. My favorite new class, though, is the new .untagged class for posts without tags.

So far WordPress hasn’t provided a good way to search for untagged posts. Well, add

.untagged {
   color: #F00;
}

and you’ll figure out quickly which posts are untagged. Crude, but fun.

I’m quite excited about the use of get_avatar and much richer hCards for commentators. You’ll now see the appropriate use of a.url for commentators with links and img.photo with avatars.

I also looked at how to best use the new is_front_page() function. There has always been a body.home class, so now I had to differentiate .home and, well, something else.

So right now we have is_front_page() producing body.home and is_home() producing body.blog. As the front page will be the, er, home page, and the home page will be the page with blog posts.

So chew on that sentence and then figure it out.

By Scott | Posted in Development | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

Sandbox now in your language

February 1, 2008 – 8:26 pm

Sandbox version 1.3 has been tagged and released. Enjoy.

So what’s new with the latest version? Mainly it now features several localizations, including Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and Norwegian. I’d like to add more languages, so I’m hoping there are some international users out there willing to help translate. Please.

For those of you interested in a precise change log, I’m happy that Google Code has stepped up and is offering a much better UI. Much better. So you can browse the repository online and check out exactly what is new.

By Scott | Posted in Development | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

Help translate the Sandbox

January 27, 2008 – 7:00 pm

Thanks to the nudging of Sandbox users, the latest version of the Sandbox now includes a sandbox.pot file for use in translating the theme files. So now I’d like to ask international Sandbox users to help provide translations in their languages.

Special thanks to Kjell Knudsen for providing the Norwegian translation and the sandbox.pot file. Nokao has been kind enough to provide the Italian translation.

Subversion users can get the latest version from the Sandbox repository:

svn checkout http://sandbox-theme.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Kjell was kind enough to provide an outline on how to help translate on the Sandbox project home, Sandbox in Your Language. When you have your .mo and .po files ready to submit, just open a ticket on the Sandbox project home and I’ll email you for the files.

And I’m excited to be opening up the Sandbox to a wider audience—the non-English speaking world. A much wider audience.

By Scott | Posted in News | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Holiday surprise: Sandbox v1.2

December 25, 2007 – 8:39 pm

On my holiday, I went through the Sandbox issue list and fixed three bugs and release Sandbox version 1.2. There have been no changes affecting the layout of the Sandbox or any existing Sandbox-based theme templates.

Issue 48 resolves the stripping of whitespace in sandbox_globalnav(), the list of pages that occurs in header.php. Thanks to Adam.

Issue 49 resolves a problem with the new wp_link_pages() function parsing incorrectly.

Issue 51 fixes an i18n problem with translation of the text “and tagged” in single.php and attachment.php. Thanks to Lloyd.

Enjoy your holidays.

By Scott | Posted in Development | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)