WordPress MU

love you man ... love for sharing this.

Q,

I'm right beside you with widgets.

The one that has been driving me nuts is the links widget.

In a non-list sidebar, it kills validation because you end up with source that's

<li ... > title stuff
<ul>
links
</ul>
</li>


which produces a validation error because of a lack of an opening ul/ol.

I've ended up modding the actual bookmark function, to include 2 options.

"links_before_cat" and "links_after_cat"

Then, set the params when registering the sidebar. By default (for most sidebars which are already lists), they're empty.

But, just in case you need to add it for those rare themes, it's available.

Then for the actual widget, I just pass along the value. If it's empty, it's empty.

I'm still playing with it though, to see if it breaks anything else. It "shouldn't", but you know how that is.

yeah I pretty much gave up trying with non h2-li themes myself :-). Probably the easier would be to specifically overwrite the links widget in those themes ? This way you're sure you don't break anything elsewhere. Giraffe has some examples of widget-overriding to be compatible with the layout.

The Dark Maple theme needs
padding: 0px 0px 10px;
added into the #navigation css in file style.css. Otherwise the post title will overlap the post navigation system.

You're right Q.
At the time I was half brain dead, and unregistering links didn't cross my mind.
That is a much better option, and more flexible as well.

I made a custom widget that displays a greeting to the user/guest, plus either lists links to the users own blog and admin, plus logout, a link to the primary site, etc. For a guest it displays login, register, and main site link.

I ran across 3 themes (2 in this pack) that set an "a" tag as the full width of the sidebar. So I ended up unregistering my widget, and adding it back in in functions.php.

A couple themes from this pack I've ended up either not using, or pushing to my "edit later" pile. Mainly because I'm not in the mood at the moment to spend an entire day on a theme, when most are taking less than 30 minutes to add in the tweaks I want. Which aren't much, really. Ajax comments, paged comments, additional header info, custom footer, and arranging the sidebar for when widgets are set yet.

For example, K2 didn't play nice with paged comments. It killed K2's own ajax comments, so if I offer that one later on I'll have to go back and edit it quite a bit.

Of course after modding 5 or 6 themes, it kind of becomes a robotic process.

Thanks for the feedback guys - the more specific the better. If anyone wants to email me fixed up themes then I'll include them in this and credit them in the footer.

james (at) incsub /dot/ org

Is anybody having problems with K2 on Firefox? The header image loads correctly in IE, but in Firefox it appears blank.

It was fine for me while I was paying with it. Although, I did throw K2 into the "edit later" pile as I mentioned earlier.

-- James

The "biggest" thing I've noticed with some of these themes is the way they implement the loop.

A few of them run the loop similar to this:

<?php
if ($posts) {
foreach($posts as $post) { start_wp();
?>


Which (at least on my test box) was killing permalinks to posts and such, and was forcing 404 errors.

I can't recall which ones off the top of my head, but there were several. Benevolence was one of them.

I don't know if it's an old way to go about it, or what the deal is, but I've never seen that done prior to seeing these particular themes.

Going back and implementing the "normal" loop cleared it up right as rain.

Yep, it was probably an older version of the loop. Benevolence (for example) was originally coded quite some time ago.

Also? Get the latest widget code and it should clear up the pages/links formatting:
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/widgets/trunk

K2 on FF works fine here. There's a light mod for it somewhere her ein the forums so it plunks the custom header in the user's files, instead of the them folder's where all users can get to it. (And who wants a randomized header with someone else's pics in it?)

Also with K2 it relies on the user having a file previously uploaded (thus creating the directory to upload to) so I've modded the text a bit to get people to do that first.

Thanks for the pointers all - am going to try and put in some time on this asap.

Cheers, James

Lucky you James... ;)

I've finally got to about 98% with all my initial configs and inserts with themes.

Kudo's to ya though, for the one I'm using out of the pack saved me some time knowing they intially (for the most part) worked out of the box. ;)

Another quick fix for Dark Maple:

In style.css add this to #content:

overflow: hidden;


That will fix the tiny problem of users having overly large images.

i think the overflow thing is to add to most existing themes, on the content div and the sidebar div.

First, Thanks for sharing.
Second.. sorry for the newbie question.

I just installed WPMU, and then added the themes, and tested one. I lost the original homepage, when it said which file to modifiy to make my own index page, and display latest blogs added etc. I wanted that :(

I choose the default theme again, but the original splash screen with the Create a blog, and recent blogs, does not display.

How can I bring that back?
Suggestions on making a nice front page?
thanks

The original theme is named "home" and is almost exactly like default. :)

If you poke around the files, go to wp-content/themes/home/ and look for home.php. That file has what you're looking for.

thanks andrea_r :) Help appreciated

You might want to do some testing, before you upgrade to Mu 1.1.1.
I've just had stacks of themes break after an upgrade, from your pack and the other one.

What about nevans' remarks ??

Has it been solved ?? Is there a way to catch the modified & secured theme pack ?

Farms, could give us some input about this ??

Tks,

Posted 2007-01-29 07:30:35 by nevans.

I had a few problems with this theme pack - mainly the footer text and a handful of XSS holes. I've been living, eating, and breathing this themepack for about sixteen hours now, and I've rolled my changes back into a zip. Here are my updates.I've included a README file in the root directory that gives a complete listing of my changes, what templates were vulnerable to the XSS attacks I mentioned, and what I changed to mitigate the risks. If someone wants to follow up with me about this, I can be reached at owlmanatt@gmail.com. And thanks for the great pack, Farms!

enseignement, there's no need to spam the forums with multi posts about the same subject.

sorry :s

NP you just owe us a beer.

New theme pack is about half way there - keep on getting sidetracked by work 'n stuff :)

<ears perk up>

Did someone say beer?

Maybe it could be very good if themes you will upload are internationalized ... :)
When you say "new theme pack", do you mean, new themes or the same themes with changes (security, etc.) ?

Benjamin

He means...

"I'm being a very nice guy and uploading some themes I'm using to help other people get a head start."

;-{}

If you're interested, I got the url of Nevans' modified theme pack, maybe it could be a good idea to update wpmudev (broken link).

Benjamin

Aw, I have to do it anyway so I might as well give it away :)

I mean both actually, security and more themes - although I think the next release will be two packs - 1 with a whole heap of themes from the past and present and another with web2 funky themes.

It'll incorporate all of the modifications made by Nevan but do go ahead and post his fixes ere - I'm sure that there'll be things that need to get fixed up in the new packs too (I'm an enthusiastic amateur :)

Cheers, James