I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.

If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?

Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.

Also, sbruner (Steve Bruner) posted on the TDOMF forums that he has used the TDOMF plugin to create a rather nifty Contact Manager Theme for Wordpress. It looks pretty damn cool. Well done!

My previous theme (which I’ve made avaliable here) was a bit limited and, to be honest, I was beginning to find it more ugly each day. However it was an exercise in data-hiding and trying to control visitor flow. (I don’t think I succeed, did I?)

This time round I wanted something snappy and something easier to read without it being cluttered.

So here are some screenshots, side by side with the previous theme so you can compare if it’s an improvement or not. You can click on the image to see it full size.

New Theme	Old Theme

I found the Wordpress theme structure a bit awkward actually to do some of the things I wanted to do, but I managed to do something at least!

For a start, I wanted to tidy up the presentation of comments. I wanted to seperate the trackbacks (and pingbacks) out of the comment list and place them in the sidebar. This meant I was dealing with comments in the single template instead of the comments template. But I got it to work, even though Wordpress doesn’t like that way too much. You can see it in action on this post which currently has 25 unique trackbacks. Also with the comments, I made comments from the original post author stand out. Makes it easier to see when the author is responding to comments.

Another little feature I wanted was the ability to add stuff to the sidebar on a per post basis. For example having a download link for a piece of software or even adding a paypal button to specific posts. This was rather simple to do, using Wordpress’ “custom fields” on posts. (Again this post has an example of the feature). Now why isn’t there custom fields for categories?

Following on from that I use the “sidebox” idea to move user functions that clutter up posts to the sidebar and used explanatory text rather than “next” and “previous” which I never click when I happen on other blogs.

And of course, I needed rounded corners. I managed to build in Nifty Corners Cube to dynamically generate those lovely rounded corners. The problem with it was when I tried to have “tabs” with rounded corners in IE, FireFox and Opera. Pain in the butt. In the end, dropped trying to have rounded tabs. But at least now I can include Nifty Corners Cube into any theme!

So eh, what do people think? Good, bad, meh?

If anyone wants to know how I did some of these things in Wordpress (or anything else on my site), drop me a line and I’ll write-up how I did it

Now that I’ve got it up and running, I need to actually add some new features to justify it! So expect to see tags, thread comments and potentially email subscriptions soon. And then there is the upgrade to Wordpress 2.1. I’m dreading that.

Download the Theme!

I wanted to drive visitors to the more interesting bits on my site, so the top menu does not contain all the pages or categories, but choice ones. Using this theme on my own webpage, I put the other top-level categories and pages on the “Other Stuff” page. Was it effective on getting people to visit the stuff I want? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s time for me to change.

This theme has been tested with Wordpress 2.0.4. I cannot guarantee that this theme will be compatible with other versions.

Installing

You can download it from here. Once downloaded, extract the contents. You should have a directory called tdo2006 with several files in it. Copy this directory and files to your wp-content/themes directory. You can then activate the theme from your admin panel.

Customisation

You will have to customise the menu at the top. To do this, open header.php and edit the code to use the categories and pages you specifically want.

I’ve also included a number of additional category templates. If you want to use them to replace the default, just rename them to category.php. If you want to use them for a specific category, copy and rename to category-id.php where id is the id of the category. You can find the id in the manage categories page.

To add or change the random messages on the front page, just edit dark_messages.html

History

6th October 2006: Version 1.0

First release

Since my foray into LiveJournal, I’ve started writing more for my website (which is more and more becoming like some sort of blog). However the way entries are organised on my webpage (I’m talking about thedeadone.net and not livejournal) means that most of my writing gets filed under the general category: “News, rants, opinions and general thoughts”. Not a clever way of doing it. So I need a little feedback on it…

I was using categories to highlight particular entries, ones that I felt formed a more complete article or are, in themselves, for presentation. For example, software I wrote and made available is filed under software but when I write about software, I don’t put it under there. This is probably not a clear-cut example as it makes sense to have a separate category for downloadable software. I better example is roleplaying. This is in the subcategory of writing. Here I put mostly complete articles that I would like to have people find easily. However I’ve written much more about roleplaying that I haven’t put in there because it’s either throw-away or I’m still thinking about it.

What I was thinking of doing, was to be more free with my category usage, breaking up my general category into numerous others but then having a category called “Gallery” which contains a subset of categories. I can assign an entry to multiple categories so I assign under the correct category and if I want to highlight it on my website, I stick it also under the gallery one. Then, from the main links on my webpage you can browse the gallery category for my showy articles and from there then explore the more general categories. In a sense using categories like “tags” and then using the special Gallery subset of categories as the way I have been using categories all along. Is this a good way of doing it? What do other people think?

One of the problems with reorganising my categories is that it changes the url’s of my articles. Which can mean they get picked up as “new” articles by the various feeds such as redbrick planet. I’d like to get this right in one step, so I have to make sure that it’s a good layout. If I do re-orgainse, it’s probaly a good idea to trim back and delete some of my entries, perhaps archiving really old ones that, to be honest, are utter rubbish, mental note to self.

Aside: mental doodle (which is described here somewhere) for this week: “I walk the moonlight path, the stars dancing on infinity. The Devil sings a lullaby while the Angels die on stakes. Far below is Earth, far above is darkness; the dead void of fear and hate, full of the light of madness. Seek the voidless untruth and find the greatest truth of all.”

Update #1: Did a little surf’in and found this and this articles from a wordpress blogger called Lorelle. Seems she’s done much more thinking on the subject of using categories and tags. More food for thought. In a sense, my “gallery” idea could be done using Wordpress categories and then I just “tag” all my other posts. However I’m not completely happy with that. It would provide an immediate solution… but that still leaves the majority of my entries sitting in “news” or (worse) I could stick them all in uncategorized. I’d like to be able to categorize my existing entries, just for my own sense of order.

Update #2: No comments yet, so I figure it’s okay to add my thoughts directly to the article. So I did a brief scan of all my previous posts. I’m quite happy to leave them all, oddly, though I may update links and such that have gone dead.

Categories to leave alone

I’m happy enough with these categories. I see no reason to change them. These would have formed the bulk of what I was calling “Galleries”.

Computer Games > Quake; Quake 2; Vampire the Masquerade Redemption;
Drawings > 3D; Alice in Wonderland; Black and White; Character; Chargey Studies; Renegade Art; Sketchs
LJ
Software
Writing > Roleplaying; Short Stories

Categories to remove

There is really only one problematic category. Even from the title, it is obvious the category needs to be split.

News, rants, opinions and general thoughts

Categories to add

This is how I’d imagine breaking down the all-consuming news category

News > Webpage; Personal

I would split actual “news” into two. “Personal” (which is kind of like a blog) and “Webpage” which is about the webpage; new features, changes, updates, etc.

Thoughts

Thoughts, “off-topic” posts and rants. At some point I should review them of course and see if a new category is needed.

Projects

News, rabblings, thoughts, etc. about any personal projects such as RPGs, writing and software.

Tech

Writings about programming, technology, software etc.

Weird

Weird stuff I found. I do try to avoid posting links I find via digg.com and boingboing.net but occasionally stuff passes my way that I find interesting.

Writing > Musings

Thoughts, articles, rabblings and other tit-bits to do with writing in general.

I’d also expand my usage of Writing > Roleplaying. Right now it’s a mix of full articles and adventures. It will now also contain my thoughts on roleplaying too.

Is this a good layout?

This theme is originally a conversion of my site when moving from a MovableType setup to Wordpress. Because of that I added a lot of extra functionality into the theme but don’t worry, it’ll work out of the box on a new system without any plugins. (If your interested in the code, most of it is in “tdo-functions.php”).

This theme is for Wordpress 1.5 or better. It has been successfully tested in Wordpress 2.0. Download it.

It uses CSS to have two conceptual menus. The one on the left is the traditional WP sidebar. The one on the right is customised to the section being displayed (i.e. for category archives, pages, date archives, author archives, etc.).

It is entirely built up on the idea of categories represent sections of your site. In my old MT setup I used to split my page into several “blogs” with their own categories. Thanks to the wonder of WP’s proper implementation of subcategories, I can do away with that and treat my entire website as one site. So the top level categories represent major sections, thats why they are listed in the sidebar. If you browse to one of the sections, the sub categories are shown on the right side. You can of course browse to sub categories of sub categories etc. Category descriptions are used.

I’ve also verified that the theme works in IE, Opera and Mozilla but I haven’t tried it on other OSes besides Windows.

For an example of this in action, check this site (one of mine) and the ‘looks’ of the different subcategories: ‘Game’ pages on MOC.

Installing

You can download it from here. Once downloaded, extract the contents. You should have a directory called tdo with several files in it. Copy this directory and files to your wp-content/themes directory. You can then activate the theme from your admin panel.

Upgrading

If you are using an older version of the theme, first remove the functions.php as this will cause Wordpress 2.0 to crash. Then just overwrite the old files with the new files.

Personalising

You can personalise in many ways without modifying the template files
themselves.

You can specify a different icon (IE’s favorites icon), stylesheet, banner image and background image for the whole theme or just specific categories and authors.

Sub categories will take on the properties of their parent category and single posts will take on a stylesheet of the parent category or author. I implemented this because on one of the sites I use, a category can represent a logical grouping including subcategories and individual posts. The author thing I just added because I could.

The order of preference is this:
1. Category
2. Author (if applicable)
3. Sitewide
4. Defaults

To do all this is quite simple. Just drop in a file in the the tdo directory with the correct name. They all start with the prefix “my”:

my"type"[(-cat|-author)"id"].”ext”

For example to specify a new stylesheet for the site, it would be:

mystyle.css

For a category with id 2:

mystyle-cat2.css

And for an author with id 4:

mystyle-author2.css

For the banner and background images for category with id 4 you would have:

mybanner-cat4.jpg and mybg-cat4.jpg

And to change the icon for the entire site you can use:

myicon.ico

Because I’m such a nice person, I’ve include a selection of alternative banners and background images which you can just rename to use. They are called tdo-banner-alt-"name".jpg and tdo-bg-alt-"name".jpg.

If I do any updates to this theme, you won’t have to modify your files, just overwrite the update theme files.

Extra Bits

Hmm. Well you have a “Logged In as ‘username’” in the header with quick links to register, login and logout. Additionally, the category path is printed here too.

On the main page, you’ll see that automagically on the right side, an extract from the latest post from each major category is shown. Additionally, the last five comments are listed too.

If you go a author’s archive you’ll see some details are displayed about the author (including the profile). If you’re logged in, you’ll see their full details including email. By default in WP you can’t really display this information without additional code.

The “path” is displayed at the top. The path is the category path and post. For posts that belong to more than one category, the first category found is used.

Hope you like it and if you do, you can drop me a line on my website. I’m not really vain, but I would appreciate it if you left the “Theme design by Mark Cunningham” in the footer (though you could rename it to “Original Theme desiged by Mark Cunningham”, that’d be okay).

History

10 February 2006: Version 1.3

* Fixed custom category stylesheet, banner and bg. It was broken by WP 2.0 but I hadn’t noticed. It’s possible that some of the other features are broken.

4 January 2006: Version 1.2

* Updated to Wordpress 2.0
* Added screenshot

17 May 2005: Version 1.1

Some general fixes and updates.

* Comments and trackbacks were not displayed correctly. This is fixed.
* The banner image scrolled weirdly. This is now fixed.
* If a post had no title, the browse arrows and the link in the ‘latest’ column would not work. This is now fixed.
* The entry ‘path’ links work correctly for pages now.
* Updated to be compatible with Wordpress 1.5.1

2 March 2005: Version 1.0

First version

This is definitly not a ‘blog’ theme. It is designed for a more static personal homepage, using Wordpress as a content manager instead of a blogger tool. Not much room for ‘fancy’ plugins like polls or such (not that they ever got much traffic).

The whole redesign has been based on the traffic my site recieved. By having less links and content upfront, the user isn’t over-awed by information and hopefully they’re be a little more curious by whats underneath.

I don’t know yet if I’ll turn the theme into a downloadable theme. If you would like this theme, then drop a comment on this post to tell me! In fact, if you have any feedback on the new look, I’d like to know!