WordPress MU

This came across one of the WordPress mail list this morning and I don't see a mention of it here on the forums.

Canvas for wordpress. It appears to be an editing system for themes for WordPress.

Anyone try it yet?

Thanks,
-drmike

Interesting.

Looks like you need Canvas-compatable themes as well. There's 3 listed, two of which I know don't work without tweaking under MU.

Ooh, that looks cool .. Gotta play some with that tomorrow :)

Did anyone ever try this?

I just put it in my test server and it seems promising. It worked out of the box except for some rss-functions.php file which it think should be in wp-includes. I think it would be time better spent to modify Canvas or work with the developers to make Canvas 100% MU compatible. It seems that this provides the functionality users are longing to have.

Has to go in plugins as it throws an error if it is in mu-plugins. Does save things so that users can edit the same theme and have a different look. Not sure how much work would be involved to make it 100% compatible and also not sure how many themes are out there with Canvas support. Although the customizability cuts down on the number of base theme that would be needed.

kahless, with plugins that point to rss-functions.php I usually just change it to point to rss.php. I don't know if the two php files are identical or not, but it's never broken a plugin for me.

That Sweetbuzz Green theme we talked about in another thread has a Canvas supported version.

It seems that all the download links are broken. It was that thread which got me thinking about Canvas and made me revive this thread.

I hope someone besides me is looking at Canvas. It sure seems to be doing what it should and offers way more customization than what I've seen in other themes.

well, I have a fresh copy of a canavas theme to play with. I gather that's the only way to get canvas at the moment, as I completely missed anywhere on the actual canvas page to download it.

I think you're right andrea. Hemingway has a similar options set in the theme panel, so I wouldn't put it past them.

http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/download

Three themes on the site. All need to be cleaned up to work with MU. Most notably is the rss-functions.php which needs to be changed to rss.php. I haven't made it through all of them. I have one up on a test blog.

http://freshpursuits.com/canvas/get.php?file=kiwicanvas-2.0.3.zip
http://freshpursuits.com/canvas/get.php?file=kiwi-lite-2.0.zip
http://freshpursuits.com/canvas/get.php?file=tarskicanvas-1.0.1.zip

You know, I thought maybe I missed something, but there is no download link on the main page.

Now that I've poked around, it looks like a slicked-up and geeked-out version of creating your own options page. Kinda like what the_undersigned did here:
http://theundersigned.net/2006/06/wordpress-how-to-theme-options/
But with more geeks points and fun dragging and dropping - which is fine if you're on a speedy machine.

I'd like to see a bunch of existing themes have more & better options. Often, a user likes a theme, but just wants to tweak it a teeny bit. This can be done much easier and more elegantly than Canvas, I'm afraid.

Andrea I agree with you 90% of the way, but I will say this. One of the things that my kid sister really liked about Xanga was the ability to pick and choose whatever layout she wanted and drag and drop things where she wanted them.

If I can provide my users with half that functionality, even if it is restricted to only one theme at present, that's better than nothing at all!

any more progress with canvas? it looked promising though...