Blog Theme with view to release

Hi LiverpoolLad,

It all looks fine in FireFox for me.

I like the header, it has a lot of artistic work done there, and it has a solid look to it.

Good luck with working out the final problems. It will be worth it because a lot of people will use it. Good luck.

I finally discovered what the problem was. I’ve taken the blog apart, and must have tried 1000 tricks to make the blog obey me.

My Waterloo began because I’d used a first letter rule in the css, and for some wierd reason, the site crashes in IE6 when I have the css with that particular rule, and then try and add the <!--more--> code in a certain manner.

Take the first letter rule out, and viola, no crashes. Besides, the big capital letter on the start of each paragraph is not really suitable for a basic news website/blog theme. Artistic blogs, maybe.

I’ll spend another week or so testing the theme out, but seems like I’ve finally discovered the culprit.

I’m testing the theme with WordPress 2.03, and have made a few changes in it. You can check out the public theme 1 and 2, plus the Liverblog theme which has a few differences in the layout. The rest I have are all just the same theme with a different banner. None of those banners are going to be included, but it shows you that you can have a nice big banner, and throw the H1 and description in the sidebar.

The aim of the theme is allow a 3 column news (or whatever) website/blog to be used with minimum graphics and nothing fancy. Easy to read and navigate is my pledge on this one.

I’ll do a nice info file, and make it theme switcher and calendar enabled. Needless to say it verifies in the css and xhtml.

I’d call it a decent bare bones three column.

Fixed width, works on a 800 resoultion (not many 3 columns do this) and is fine in IE7 as well as FF and Ie6.

Any suggestions for getting it ready would be appreciated.

https://www.kirkbytimes.co.uk/wordpress7/

That’s great news. Congratulations on finding the culprit. Your perseverance paid off.

Is there any way to easily convert your 3-column theme to a 2-colum one?

Good luck and keep up the great work.

it shows you that you can have a nice big banner, and throw the H1 and description in the sidebar.

I think semantically putting the h1 somewhere toward the end of the code is not OK. It break the whole idea of headings:
h1
- h2
- h2
--- h3
--- h3
- h2...
etc. The headings are not for “styling” stuff – it’s more for defining the structure. But that just might be my OCD ??

Moshu, thanks as ever for pointing out the things a lot of us overlook.

You are spot on there. I did make that mistake when first using Css, instead of using divs. I even used headings to put images in with no text.

Luckily, that issue is not there for the two themes that are going to be released,they have the H1 header in the header.php.

Its my personal theme that has the H1 header taken from the header and slipped to the top of the rightsidebar. I can ammend that, and will have little choice.

DomFontana, the theme is easy to ammend if you know a little css and know where to look for the php call ups for the extra sidebar. I’ve grouped all the Css elements so you could easy wipe out all the sidebarright stuff and just add on the pixels you’ve taken to the content and the other sidebar. Its fixed width, so should be easy. The only difficulty with Joe and Jill public ammending it right now is that it uses an image to make the three columns. Not everyone will be able to ammend that so I’ll do a two column theme also which would be easy for me seems as I can close my eyes and picture each php file and know the css inside out, almost.

The first letter Css rule does have issues in IE6, these are fixed in IE7 beta, and are ok in FF and Opera and others. I don’t need the capitalised letter but have managed to get it working on IE6 on another site, non WordPress.

Cheers to everyone who has helped me along the way.

That’s great Liverpool. If you do a 2-column one, I’m going to use it. You do very nice work.

Wow! This theme has changed a lot since the last time I visited this thread. I just checked the IE6 crash page and nothing happened (IE6 on WinXP). And the new header graphic looks very nice!