Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

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.

UPDATEThe plugin is now in the Habari Extras repository. There is a branch and tag for 0.6, and a 0.7 branch for the new plugin XML format. Any bugs/issues should be directed to the Extras Trac.

Unlike a blockquote, which is a HTML element meant to offset a quotation from the main text, a pull quote is a technique traditionally used in print to draw attention to a salient point in an article. Pull quotes generally take a small section of text and offset it from the article in a larger typeface. In addition to helping highlight a noteworthy point, a pull quote can add a graphic element by breaking up particularly long pieces of text.

Pull quotes were traditionally achieved in web publishing by appending the selected text to the end of the paragraph and then styling with CSS. The downside to that is that in mediums that don’t adhere to the style sheet (like syndication feeds), you wind up with the duplicate content at the end of a paragraph, which can confuse the reader to say the least.

Fortunately, through the wonders of jquery, Chris Coyier whipped up a way of simply wrapping the desired text in a span that clones the text and floats it. The beauty of this technique is that you’re not duplicating markup. Any medium that doesn’t recognize the class on the span simply ignores it, and the article reads normal.

With the help of Michael Harris who reworked the javascript, I’m proud to announce my first full fledged Habari plugin, simple as it may be. You can see it at work in this post and on another recent post.

Usage

Upload pullquotes to your user/plugins directory and activate the plugin. There is no configuration required. To create a pullquote from existing content, wrap the desired text in a span with a class of either pquote-r or pquote-l.

Example

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. <span class="pquote-r">Ut enim ad minim veniam</span>, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.</p>

Customizing

Pull Quotes has a default style included. To customize the CSS, make sure in your theme’s header file that $theme->header(); is called before the theme’s style sheet. You can then add span.pull-left and span.pull-right to your theme’s style sheet and customize the pull quote to fit your design and tastes.

Download

Pull Quote version 0.2

Note: This plugin will eventually be handed over to the Habari extras repository, however in my exuberance of writing my first plugin, and desire to experience writing up a detailed post for one, I am releasing it on my personal site first. Once I test it against 0.5.2 to determine if a separate version is required, I will add it to the repo, so any bugs or feature requests should be logged in the extras trac. Comments certainly welcomed as well.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed resurrecting this blog over the past 2 months, all the while trying to find the motivation to start food blogging again. However, the more I search for that motivation, the more I’m drawn to the idea of further consolidating my blogging efforts to this single domain. It’s not as if I get a huge amount of traffic on my cooking content anyway, and what little there is, should easily migrate over much like bloggingmeta’s traffic did with a permanent redirect.

One idea I had was to see if I’d do more food blogging by simply posting them to this site first, without migrating the old content, but if I were to succeed in my experiment, I’d find myself in a similar predicament in that I’d have no way to migrate back to the food blog, not to mention I’d potentially be penalizing myself in regards to search engine stuff.

The primary obstacle is how to migrate the content. I highly doubt my code-fu would allow me to write a Habari-to-Habari importer by myself, though I’ve not even looked at any of the importers. I’m not as worried about comments, so I’ve got some too-ashamed-to-disclose hacks I’m contemplating to overcome the importing dilemma. If anyone wants to help with this goal, I’ll contribute as much as I can to making a formal Habari migration plugin.

Once I were to overcome that obstacle, the goal then would be to design a magazine-ish style theme that would allow for sections based on tags. As I find myself blogging more and more about the iPhone, I’ve been concerned that it might turn off the few readers I have. Building on the tag based sections would also allow me to better offer tag based feeds—though I don’t know if it’s possible to create a feed by excluding a tag ;-). I’m sure I could easily redirect the feed from the cooking site to a /atom/tag/food (or what ever the structure is).

So I’m hoping that one of the 25 odd subscriber/readers might have an opinion on such a move in both how it might effect me search engine wise, and what your opinion would be on having such a diverse amount of content.