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New theme pack (58 posts)

  1. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Alrighty then... I've uploaded a new theme pack to wpmudev.org.

    Theme pack by Farms

    It's got 25 jolly nice themes in it - all widgetised, all with options you don't want users to have removed, many with custom header opportunities and all attempting to be modern.

    Let me know how you find 'em, comments on any bugs, issues or themes you think should be added are gratefully received here or there.

    Enjoy!

    Cheers, James

  2. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Thank you. :) There were a good amount I haven't actually used yet, or didn't bother to make sure it worked in MU after an initial broken try.

    What does the (tp) mean in the names? Those are ones you edited?

    (still looking some over)

  3. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I've lifted (and twiddled with - to an extent) some out of Andrew's earlier pack - those are the tp ones.

  4. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Ahhh... good to see that someone got the Theme pack to work in MU. Opens up all kinds of things and saves me a pile of work.

    Also, there were a couple of themes with references (on the options pages) to uploading new styles or dong things in the theme folder. Users on an MU system just get confused by that.

  5. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Yeh, I need to fix up a few descriptions and cut out any confusing stuff - let me know which themes need cleaning that way and I'll set to work :)

  6. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I've updated all the descriptions to nice pithy one liners :)

    Looking forward to further feedback / bugs.

  7. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Thanks a ton Farms.

    I looked at the original theme pack, and canned it after about 5 minutes.

    Only suggestion: kill the (tp) stuff.

    I'll test it out over the next few days and see if there are any big ticket problems. It might be only a couple themes at a time, but I'll do my best.

  8. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Pssst...

    what's up with the .rar extension?

    Any particular reason?

  9. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Just me being crap - I'll zip the next version :)

  10. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Cool. Not like sticking ya for it. Just curious.

    If I post suggestions/bugs, don't sweat it.
    I appreciate the effort, and your time in saving mine. :D

  11. coolrasta
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    just downloaded it ... It's fantastic ... Thanks

  12. mrjcleaver
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Any chance of a zip? It'd be accessible to far more people. Thanks.

  13. mshao
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Thanks a lot. I have found that there are a lot very professional themes in your pack suitable for my site http://archexpression.com/.

  14. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Kewl - have added a new package with some tweaks and in .zip format.

    Also I'm more than happy to add themes to the package (actually, if you know a good one that I've missed I'd be really grateful if you could let me know!) I've put on the themes page:

    "Should let you know that I'm not keen on:
    -Big pictures at the top that can't be replaced
    -Themes that look 2+ years old

    But am *very* keen on:
    -Themes that allow users to insert their own headers (by URL or by upload)"

    Cheers, James

  15. suleiman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Farms, can you let us know if the new pack has new themes from the old one? Or just modifications?

    Reason being I've already modded a lot of the themes from your initial posting, so I wouldn't have to do those one's over again :)

  16. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Just mods at the mo...

  17. suleiman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    cool...thanks for your efforts :)

  18. kprimdal
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Does Mu-adminbar works on all themes at your installs ? Because i can't get i working on them all.

  19. Ovidiu
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    me too :-) I already edited some of them, adding padding-top: 28px; which fixed the display probs on those but still it does not show up on some...

  20. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I have a secret... I just don't like MU Admin bar... it looks 'orrible, has about a 50% success rate with themes and messes with the independence of each blog (in my book).

    If someone could release a corresponding pack with that fixed up that'd be great, but I just get arsey when I'm around it ;)

  21. corourke
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    This is awesome.

    I noticed that the Freshy theme (and I'm guessing a few of the others) has an issue with the pages widget and the links widget. When I use the "Links for Freshy" widget it returns a blank widget and the pages widget slaps some css (giving a li) to the h2 title).

    I'm completely befuddled on what I need to change the freshy function to.

    Moreso on topic though: If a few of you want to form a small dev cluster with me we can split up the lions share of themes still to port/convert/optimize and churn out a few themes a week at the worst?

  22. quenting
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    The giraffe2 theme which is included in the pack is not WPMU ready (too bad, it's awesome).
    Uploaded files and user-specific css are stored in the theme directory, which means everyone can access each other's uploaded files, these files are not counted in the user's limit, and one user changing css will impact all others using the theme. There's more work to do on the theme to make it compatible, right now it's not possible to use it in a production environment.

  23. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Thanks for the heads up Q.

    I've been converting a few themes for my personal use, before I really dive into the ones James has ported.

    I do know though, that for the dozen or two I've been working with, if the theme has its own "options" page, I've just been disabling it.

    I've also pretty much redone the sidebars for them too. Mainly to have a unified "default" look if the user hasn't places any widgets on it yet, I have a custom login/user function I've been putting at the top, but also to make sure that the sidebar once it's arranged doesn't break the theme at all in terms of validation.

    I think Citrus (note, not in the theme pack, but nice looking none the less) has been my biggest time consumer so far. But it would need a lot of work even if it wasn't for MU.

  24. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Some people (like us) have written their own options pages for themes, it's just ohz's one that breaks in MU.

    Know what you mean about broken themes that have been realeased that way. *sigh*

    I've got a ton of themes in use, here) and have plans to eventually have most of them (where possible) all tricked out and easy for MU users to use. And yes I'll get around to passing them on as well as finishing up that home theme for MU. :)

  25. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    There was another theme I was playing with, not in the pack, that broke with its own options page as well.

    It was that and another one or two that after some heavy thought lead me to just taking out the options pages for any themes that have them. The sidebars will be widgetized, so for a freebie site IMHO that's good enough for now for this particular deal.

    I will say though, that overall most of the themes have been a snap to edit. Granted, they were already widget-ready, and in an unordered list fashion, so it wasn't difficult whatsoever to pop in my own default sidebar layout.

    Of course I'm also modifying most of the headers with some of my own little preferences and tricks as well.

    The "most fun" I've had has been with what will be the primary theme for the main site, which I've also modified to use as the default theme. Nothing difficult, but it is one I've completely written from the ground up, so that explains the time.

    My personal goal is to have it running publicly by mid month, but we'll see how it goes.

    Oh, I might (no promises though), put a zip together of some of the themes I've tweaked up. I'll have to go back and take out my hardcoded stuff though. ;)

  26. gmonkiewicz
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I cannot view the themes in my themes tab under the presentation section. I uploaded all of the themes from the package into my /wp-content/themes/ directory. Is that what i was supposed to do? Anything else to configure?

  27. Ovidiu
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    go to site admin -> themes and enable them :-)

  28. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Yeah, enable them in Site Admin -> Themes. :)

    lunabyte - can't wait to see it. :) I'd love to hear about your own header tricks and preferences as well. Whenever I do a new theme, I always start with a heavily modded Classic I did because the way the header.php file was (and is written in many themes because "that's how it was done") written bugged the crap out of me. :D

  29. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I dunno, Andrea. I think it looks pretty decent. Then again, I did it so I'm supposed to say that, right?

    For the header, the results aren't anything that can't be read in the source, it's just getting there that's the fun part. :D

    Plus, I'll be the first to admit, if it's something for internal user, I'll hardcode the crap outta stuff. Mainly because every little bit helps, and i don't really need to use php just to display "Pages" or another simple title. So, the less times I have to use php to parse something, the better.

    Speaking of themes though, I just finished editing the crapola out of one. Partially for validation reasons, but a lot of it was clearing up I don't know how many wasted line breaks, and the css file was only 4 lines long. It was 4 lines, because my editor finally got tired of printing on the same line. When I finished cleaning it up, it was over 600 lines long.

    And the other files... ugh... like I said, line breaks. And I mean like

    div
    (50 line breaks)
    new div

    kinda stuff.

    Sigh... some authors, I swear.
    Then again, maybe I'm just too picky about how the source looks, but it should at least be logical and easy to follow.

  30. quenting
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    personally I've been trynig to make all themes widget comptabile too. By widget copatible I mean, really compatible, not just adding the register_sidebar functions and go. Most supposedly widget-compatible themes really aren't in that if you start adding widgets they don't display as expected. I have abenchmark blog here: http://area51.unblog.fr/ that I use to make sure a theme really shows up well in all cases (missing overflow:hidden css styles are one of the most spread problems, with too large images entered by the user breaking the whole layout).

    For the the biggest time consumers are themes that aren't properly gettexted, because I need to go look for the strings to translate in each file. Also it took me 5 hours to make Giraffe compatible with my setup :-/, but i think the theme is worth it, it's one of the best polished i've seen.
    K2 is the most value theme i think, because there's so many schemes. I've started importing new schemes in my system and just plugging them as new themes (I removed the non-header option page from k2).
    I plan to apply K2's header upload mechanism to all themes that have an image header in my system.

    Andrea, nice list ! Mine's here ( http://www.creerunblog.fr/themes.html ), I'll get inspiration from yours for the next themes to add. That davinci theme looks pretty good. I'm a bit surprised not to see regulus and fauna inthere though, they're pretty much the most popular on my site. Need a bit of work I think because there was a fix to make in the themetoolkit for fauna, but since there's no upload for and just a url for the header this part's easier.

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