andreasviklund.com

Rick Blalock of Beauty in Design will be porting a number of my designs into Joomla templates. The first port has already been released: andreas07 for Joomla. The demo looks really good, so it will be really interesting to see more Joomla versions. Thanks Rick!

I've made a number of updates and changes to my two public themes for WordPress, and both 1024px and WP-Andreas01 has been given version numbers 1.5.

Most changes are bug fixes. But I have also made some minor adjustments to the template files, and added some things that have been missing. For example, both themes now have the calendar in the sidebar by default. If you don't want it, just remove it. With the WordPress widgets plugin you can build your own sidebars easily, since both themes support the plugin.

I have also added the comment display in 1024px so you can see the number of comments for each post, and a default "Home" link at the top of the pages menu. In WP-Andreas01 I removed the thin gray lines between the main content and the sidebars, and I made the sidebar header text a bit smaller. The sidebar padding that caused a visual bug in IE6 should hopefully be fixed now. I haven't tested this yet since I don't have IE6 on my laptop, but I'll check it tomorrow on Johanna's computer to make sure it is fixed.

Swedish theme translations

Another new thing is that I will make Swedish translations of these themes available on Jokkmokk.biz. WordPress has a localization feature, and themes can be built in a way that makes them easy to translate to different languages, but I have chosen to not prepare my themes for localization yet. I will probably do it in the future, but as long as I keep on changing and updating the themes on regular basis, they can only be translated by rewriting the template files manually. I'll try to collect all translations soon, when my new site design goes online and I start adding more content to this site. Feel free to send me links to translated versions at anytime to make my work easier!

Tonight is theme testing night on andreasviklund.com, as I am going to test my new site design live on the site. The new look will be really simple, really clean and really boring. In other words, exactly what you could expect from me. The main differences are that the design is wider (1024px-friendly), has an expanded header section and a third column - and steps a bit away from the classic blog layout that I use now. It will also have a completely different menu and page structure, to make it easier for me to add new content later on.

My current site menus are terrible, as each and every one of them are hardcoded. Each page in the main menu on the top has a sub-menu in the sidebar, and whenever I add a page somewhere I need to make changes in several places in the code. A nice feature that I have now is that the "parent page" in the main menu is highlighted no matter which sub-page the visitor views. I managed to do that by abusing the conditional tags, and it is done in a really bad way that makes updates a pain. Each time the header is loaded, the conditional tags says "If the visitor is on page X, Y or Z, then highlight parent page A in the main menu" - for each of the menu options. This system was built for the first version of this site more than one year ago and it has worked really well, but today I can do it in a much better way. In the new theme all menus will be generated automatically, and it will make it more fun to add new pages…

But I'm not happy with how everything works yet so the new theme will not go live tonight, I will just try it out to see if it works as I want it to so far. Among other things, I will switch to some other archive format since my current archive is getting a bit hard to overview. I'm looking at different alternatives now, to find a compact but still functional solution. One possibility is that I use the Kottke Style Archives plugin (found through Weblog Tools Collection) in combination with something else. I don't know yet, so if you have any good suggestions for good archives I would be happy to hear them! I will also add some new features, but it will not be anything special. Just things that will make the site more fun to work with, and hopefully also more fun to visit.

The first round of testing will be done with the site in maintenance mode, which means that you will see a temporary "offline" message during an hour or two. Once everything is tested, I'll probably run the site with the new theme for an hour to see how it works live. If you happen to see this and want to help me out, please let me know if you experience any errors or problems. If nothing works, check back in an hour or two and everything should be back to normal again.

New port: Andreas01 for b2evolution, ported by Danny Ferguson!

It is made from the oldest version of the template (v1.0) so the CSS has a few traps and minor errors. For example, the menu buttons break if the button text is too long. If you experience any problems like that, you can look for fixes in version 2.0 of the original template.

You can preview the skin live on the official evoskin site. For more info about b2evo, see b2evolution.net.

Quick news today, some are perhaps old news but still worth posting:

My WordPress themes (and a few others) have been translated to Turkish…

Swedish translations of all my WordPress themes and website templates will be released at the end of the week (or possibly during the weekend) on Jokkmokk.biz. And there will be new templates, as promised a hundred times now.

I'm doing a theme co-operation project with Ajay D'Souza, in order to get some fresh inspiration and someone to exchange ideas with. It will hopefully result in a theme later on…

And finally, speaking of themes I will soon start to send out my new (and so far unreleased) template series to CMS theme coders and porting specialists, who want to get their ports out at the same time as the template release. I did this for the andreas00 template, and it was very appreciated so I'm trying it again. I will make atleast one of the WordPress theme versions myself, and then I will invite one or two theme designers to do the other ports. But other than that, everyone who would be interested in taking part of this project can send a porting request to me. Tell me which CMS you will port to, show one or a few examples of previous themes and let me know how long it till take to get the port ready - and I'll send you the template(s) back.