Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.

I’ll start by saying I don’t know much about the subject, but am posting this in the hopes that someone who does can elucidate the issue. My basic dilemma is that I have a short bit of code on my single page templates that checks to see if a visitor is from Twitter, and if so, show a little message. (Not an original idea, I think I saw it on a post at Smashing Magazine). The code they used didn’t work, but with the help of BigJibby in the Habari IRC channel, I was able to get it working with Habari.

I more or less forgot about it, until a few people noticed it and asked if it was a plugin. When I replied it wasn’t, they asked if I could make it into one. So it went into a to-do list I keep of Habari related ideas. This evening I began working on it, and while troubleshooting how to actually output something to the entry single template (that’s a whole other can of worms), I discovered the code snippet wasn’t working. With the help of Michael, we discovered the problem wasn’t with the code snippet, rather it was with the URL shorteners. Twitter recently started defaulting to Bit.ly, and I recently began experimenting with Tr.im, both of which weren’t sending twitter.com as the referrer. Rather, due to their 301 redirect they return NULL. Which in a nut shell sucks.

Somehow Google Analytics is able to track referrals from Twitter, as last week when I had a huge upsurge in traffic from the popularity of the Infinite Summer Bookmarks, I’m seeing 50 visitors from Twitter the first day (of the 785, by far a record for this little weblog).

At this point, finishing the plugin seems moot, as the only way to be sure that visitors will actually see the message would be to use a URL shortener that doesn’t return NULL, of which, the only one we found that to not be the case was Owen’s Pastoid. I didn’t test Tinyurl, nor was I interested in looking for others. The disappointment had already set in. Besides that, if you are auto posting to Twitter with a plugin, you wouldn’t have the option to use a different shortener.

So kind readers/stumble-uponers, if anyone has a solution to this problem, please enlighten me. Meanwhile, I’ll work out the issue with Habari and my desire to output content on a single entry template within the content output, not above the body tag.

For anyone interested in the snippet of code I am using:

if ( parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], PHP_URL_HOST) == 'twitter.com' ) { echo "<h2 class='twittervisit'>Welcome, Twitter visitor! If this post is useful, don't hesitate to retweet!</h2>";

This is just a quick and dirty post announcing the release. I hope to publish a more detailed post on the Habari blog detailing more about the the theme and it’s use of HiEngine.
It’s been a long time in coming, but I’m happy to report that I’ve finally released a new theme, thePrestige. Built entirely with Habari’s HiEngine theme engine, the first publicly released (at least to my knowledge.) Many thanks to Rick Cockrum for doing the heavy lifting on the Hiengine code.

Consider this a “beta” release, as there probably are a few bugs/quirks that need to be worked out, but for all intents and purposes, it’s fully functional. Any bug reports or feature requests should be logged at the Habari Extra’s trac installation. Patches certainly welcome!

The theme also features a contact form completely built with Habari’s formUI, as well as uses the jquery tooltip plugin..

One “feature” that I intend to finish up is post author comment highlighting. That is, styling the post author’s comments differently than the rest of the comments on a post. The code is in place, just needs some CSS love. Again, patches welcome!

The theme has only been tested on the latest 0.7 build of trunk, I will work on making a version that works with 0.6.2. Again, assistance welcome on this task. I think the only glaring issue right now would be the use of the jquery tooltip for the comment form.

Download the theme from Habari Extras.

Or you can check it out from the repo at http://svn.habariproject.org/extras/themes/thePrestige/trunk/.

Updated!

I inadvertently forgot to remove tracking code from the footer from when the theme was deployed on my previous site, so I’m removing the old download link and updating the release. Apologies to anyone who’s already downloaded the theme, you can download the updated version (0.3.1), which also has $theme->footer(); added, which can be a useful plugin hook.

I’m proud to release my fourth Habari theme, the third port, Aqueous. Based on an open source design by Six Shooter Media, this 3 column theme sports a fluid width middle column. The original icons have been redone with custom icons that I created so there’s no issue with redistribution. I also have restyled the comments and comment form from the original design, as well as a few other modifications for a working blog, but it still maintains the original integrity of the design, which I’ve always liked. It has that clean, modern feel to it, despite being several years old now.

I had originally ported this theme for a personal site when I first switched over to Habari, and have just never gotten around to releasing it. Now that I’m not using that site, it seemed only logical to make it available to other Habari users, especially with the lack of themes in the community. I hope that changes sooner than later, hopefully after .6 gets released and .7 starts focusing more on the theme engine. I’m curious to see what people have in mind for it, but that’s for another blog post.

I’m releasing this as an alpha release, because I really haven’t tested it in other browsers aside from Safari 4beta, but wanted to get it out and see if there was any real interest before putting too much more time into it.

One idea that I have for future a release is author comment styling, as it currently styles the comments all the same. Again, this will happen if I see that’s there is actually any interest in the theme.

The original design was released under a Creative Commons license, so there’s no chance of the theme moving to the Habari extras repository, so any comments, bugs, feature requests should be left in the comments on this post. Future posts about releases will direct comments to this post. There’s nothing worse than a site having comments scattered about the same theme/plugin.

Download Aqueous 0.3.1 alpha now.

In preparation of the impending release of Habari 0.6, as well as getting some to-do items off my list before adding more (I’ve got two theme projects I’m either resurrecting or starting), I’ve decided to update the ported themes that I’ve released.

First up, Swanky. Not that I’ve seen anyone use this theme, but I did use it as a base for my cooking blog, so it behooves me to have some updated code to make sure I’m using the latest and greatest Habari. I’m not quite sure no one has (to my knowledge) used or modified the theme, perhaps the pink and black and sexy silhouette isn’t a big draw. But as I’ve pointed out, it can be a great starting point for modification. Maybe I’m just not aware, and there are scores of sites using it…then again, since I haven’t released a new version in quite some time, that could be a factor as well. Today, that is fixed.

As I mentioned, this update is in anticipation of the impending 0.6 release, so unless you are running from svn, or a nightly snapshot, this version probably won’t work. For an overview of the theme, see the original post.

New in this release:

• Removed calls to jquery and and a deprecated Stack::out call
• Properly calling $theme->tag rather than using the potentially exploitable Controller::get_var function
• updated the calls to check for logged in and added a tab to the top navigation for logged in users to admin
• fixing a CSS bug on long post titles so they don’t cover the timestamp

This is considered a beta release, any bugs or changes will be addressed before the final release of Habari 0.6.

Download Swanky 0.5 beta now.