I’m working on a new theme, another open source design port. Being the impatient person I am, I’ve got a few tweaks still, so pardon any glitches while I finish up the tweaking. Certainly interested in any comments, I’ll post another more formal outline of the port when I’m done. This will be available for download when it’s done.
Miklb's Mindless Ramblings
chronicling life in a digital world
A bit later than I thought it would be, but I’ve updated Mzingi to reflect quite a few changes in Habari’s code. Among the changes and additions for .2 are:
- added header and footer hooks for plugins
- added post status class, to allow for styling drafts differently than published posts
- added a 404 template, including a search box on that page
- updated the pagination code and styling on home.php and other multiple entry pages
- added the pingback filtering on comments. Though a plugin, I’m assuming most people will use this feature
- added recent posts to sidebar. This code will reflect which page you are on, and show the next five. Meaning, if you are on page/2, it will show you the posts of page/3.
- added comment moderation code. Visitors who’s comments go into moderation will see their comment marked in moderation
Now to make these changes on this design (though I plan on a complete overhaul before the end of the year, so it might wait). That said, I’m looking forward to feedback, and possibly seeing this go into the default download as another optional theme as has been suggested to me. I’ll leave that to others to decide, but I’m certainly not against the idea one bit.
Please visit the Mzingi home page for the download link.
Update: New versions now available. See bottom of post for details.
Wanting to work on mzingi, I found myself a little unmotivated, so instead, I thought, maybe I can find an open source design to port to Habari, and that would get me motivated to look at the underlying code. So off I went, googling, and browsing the many repositories of open source designs, looking for something I might want to use on a personal site, and would be a nice (albeit one of few currently) available themes for Habari. I stumbled upon styleshout, and their numerous, well done themes. Ideally, I’d liked to have found one that hadn’t been ported to other platforms, but Harvest Field so caught my eye, I couldn’t help but choose it.
It just had enough fall feel to it, that I set about converting it to Habari. I wasn’t enamored with the semantics, and set about using the mzingi markup and code, tweaking for design specific features, which include having asides in the sidebar (tagging a post “asides” will leverage this feature. The tag can be changed in theme.php), recent comments in the footer column, the user pic and about content you can add via admin/options and editing your user, as well as a new twist, the next 5 most recent posts in the third column. The nifty part of this feature is that it leverages some Habari internals, and shows you the next five posts if you go backward in the page view, ie page/2 will show you the next 5 posts from page 3. This is dynamic in the sense that if you are showing 10 posts per page, as set in your options, then it will show posts 11-15 in the footer. (I will be documenting how this is accomplised in the Habari Wiki soon. Special thanks to Andrew da Silva for the help on this feature).
Another feature is the dual colored Blog title in the header. This is dynamic, in that it counts the number of characters in the title, and does a little math to split it up. You can change it manually by either editing the number it divides by in theme.php, remove it in header.php and use the default Options::out('title'), or manually add your title wrapping the section you want in light brown in span tags. Special thanks to Chris Meller for his assistance on this “feature”.
Future goals are to better style the pagination below the posts, any other suggestions are welcomed.
I had originally thought about adding a plugin hook in that column to pull a RSS feed, but I eventually thought twice about requiring an external plugin. You certainly can edit footer.php to add any type of content you desire.
As always, feedback is welcomed, and I look forward to providing more Habari themes.
For users of trunk >r1574
The original design was released with a Creative Commons license (I really need to blog about that), so I haven’t really addressed a license, suffice to say, do with it want you want code wise, just respect the original author’s wishes.
updated: New versions available. See bottom of post for details.Mzingi development will no longer done on Bloggingmeta, as it’s now included in Habari’s core theme directory. Any bugs, comments, or suggestions should be pointed to Trac
I have had the idea for a foundation type theme for Habari since I first started working with the platform earlier in the year. After spending time converting k2 to the design for this site, as well as for my cooking site, I knew that if I wanted to continue working on Habari theme design, I would need something else to work off of. No offense at all intended for the developers and users of k2, I have extreme respect for what it has achieved, I simply feel that it’s conversion to Habari was a difficult task, considering the advanced features in k2, vs being adapted to Habari at such an early stage. Andrew (aka freakrz), has done great work in advancing k2 to catch up to where the rest of Habari development is, however, I still felt I wanted my own framework to work off of.
That said, I took the initial work I had done here on Blogging Meta, and started working on a purely CSS based theme, that could be used out of the box, as well as be flexible enough to be used as a framework. I still have a long way to go in the design world, but trying to use all of the reading I’ve done, I think the markup is fairly semantic, HTML strict, and though the CSS validator chokes on the YUI font CSS, it should be valid CSS as well. I quite like the simple percentage based font sizing of the YUI CSS, as well as the built in font family cascading. Again, still plenty to learn in this direction, and perhaps at some point I’ll drop it, but it’s a good building block (perhaps after getting some time to mature, as well allow me to spend some time with it, I’ll convert to the Blue Print CSS framework).
Aside from the YUI CSS, the only other borrowed code is from Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery chapter on forms. However, this will soon be removed, as I want the license for the theme to be completely compatible with the Apache License that Habari ships with, and Andy’s code is licensed under a Creative Commons share-a-like one. (A completely different subject, which I intend to blog about soon enough.) However, for the short term, the form is quite nice, and will suffice until I can write my own CSS for it. There was also a subconscious nod to the excellent Simpla WordPress theme by Phy Ly, though no conscious code borrowed from the design.
Also, many thanks to everyone on the #habari IRC channel for tips, tricks, and code help, particularly tinyau for helping with the comment form and ringmaster for help with the tag template code.
A few notes about the theme. The theme assumes the use of the tag “aside” for the asides in the sidebar, if you want to change that tag, you would need to edit theme.php and sidebar.php to change the corresponding tag. Likewise, if you want fewer or more asides or recent comments listed in the sidebar, you will need to edit those values in theme.php. I tried to comment the file to outline what the various additions are. There’s also the addition of the ability to an excerpt, as can be seen on the tag page.
So, without further ado, the first, alpha release of the theme is now available. I’m sure minor updates will come soon, but my impatience overcomes my need for perfection.
.2. change log.
Users of trunk >r1574
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Side Notes
I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
permalinkI was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
permalinkIt’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.
permalinkYou’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
permalinkI’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
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