Feedback on a theme design please |
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Adeptris
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Hi Guys,
I have been working all day today on a new theme, it has 5 sidebars and the 'Dynamic Content Gallery' plugin, three page layouts, home, default and full width.
I have designed it as a project while learning WordPress themes, and I will make it downloadable, or a variant with a different color scheme in about a week or so.
What I would like first is if any of you have the time for a bit of feedback, any color suggestions other features etc:
http://digitalraindrops.net/demo/wordpress/
This is a days work for a programmer that is just learning, so artisteer is a good tool to kick off with.
David (Snowy Kent in th UK)
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Jerry
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David,
I wish I could help more, but honestly I am VERY impressed with the design. I like how the About page is full width versus the home page with the 2 columns.
Excellent work!
How did you do that?
How long does it take you to create such a nice theme?
Jerry
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Adeptris
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Quote Jerry:
David,
I wish I could help more, but honestly I am VERY impressed with the design. I like how the About page is full width versus the home page with the 2 columns.
Excellent work!
How did you do that?
How long does it take you to create such a nice theme?
Jerry
Hi Jerry,
It will take you about 5 minutes to do this, I have created a 'how-to' post of how to do this on my site:
http://www.digitalraindrops.net/Boards/Topic.aspx?TopicID=1#1
I like this forum but it is frustrating with no URL link options, 'tip and tricks' forum or general critiqe forum.
David
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Jerry
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David - yea I agree - video training would be nice as well.
I will check out your link.
Thanks,
Jerry
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Jerry
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David,
I checked out your blog / forum and see you added the "how to" on expanding the width after the blog is live.
My question is how did you create pages within the blog that are different than the other pages within Artisteer, or did you do that at the code level?
I am interested in using Wordpress for all websites versus html in the future and need to learn how to design pages that have a different look and feel independently from the main blog template.
Thanks,
Jerry
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Adeptris
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Hi Gerry,
The theme is just a Artisteer theme with two extra pages, I am new to artisteer and php so it was a matter of looking online for function examples, and it takes me a bit longer as I am not yet up to speed.
I spent a few hours yesterday on making the footer dynamic, so now you can populate none to four widgets areas and it will style the width dynamically.
Artisteer has up to two sidebars, I created a one sidebar theme, then I done the following, I try to limit the amount of artisteer code I change then do the following.
Add a custom folder to hold the custom.php files
Add a custom-header,php file (from Bud)
Add a custom-functions,php file (from me)
add a function that creates nine dynamic sidebars
Add a function for dynamic footer widgets
Add a dynamic width style function for footer widgets
Create the pagefull.php as per my tutorial
Create a home.php page which uses five widgets
Add code for the 'Dynamic Feature Gallery' to home.php
I then changed the following files in artisteer:
header.php add code div for custom header
footer.php add code div for footer widgets
functions.php add two include statements for my custom files
functions.php remark the add sidebars code as this is moved to my files
The most work was in the styles.css, adding nine new div style blocks, these were just copies of the 'sidebar 1' layout renamed with the width changed, then one for header and one for the featured content, that is all it took.
I kept the changes to Artisteer as little as possible and made the functions portable for other themes, the effect you see is the following, the wordpress template hierarchy says that if there is a home.php this will load instead of the index.php when home is selected, the index.php becomes the default template, and the full width can be selected from the page admin.
As an example here is the few lines of code for my home.php, I will make it downloadable later this week, and put some How-to's on my site so the functions can be used for other themes.
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div class="art-contentLayout">
<div class="home-sidebar">
<?php if (art_sidebar('home sidebar')): ?><?php endif ?>
</div>
<div class="home-featured">
<div id="home-banner">
<div class="featured">
<?php if( function_exists( 'dynamic_content_gallery' ) ) {
dynamic_content_gallery();
} ?>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="home-middle">
<?php if (art_sidebar('home middle')): ?><?php endif ?>
</div>
<div class="home-bottom-left">
<?php if (art_sidebar('home bottom left')): ?><?php endif ?>
</div>
<div class="home-bottom-right">
<?php if (art_sidebar('home bottom right')): ?><?php endif ?>
</div>
</div>
<div class="cleared"></div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
David
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Adeptris
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I have now made the footer widgets dynamic, where you can add content on 1 - 4 widgets and the theme will adjust the width based on the widget areas with content, none, quarter, third, half ore whole width.
Also as the blocks have the same background as the main theme, I have been able to add a background color to the footer widget area.
I am having trouble with the adsense in the header, it is ok on my localhost copy, but has problems in the production version, once this is fixed I will package it up for download.
http://digitalraindrops.net/demo/wordpress/
David 
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Jerry
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David,
WOW - all that is still beyond my understanding. I mean I think I can make code changes, but not sure about where and what the effects will be.
Thanks,
Jerry
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Justin
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Hello great work,
How did you get the Recent Comments, Blog Roll and posts on the bottom as widgits. I have been trying all day.
Please email me back
Justin
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