WordPress MU

I'm trying to put together a themes pack for wpmu to keep people from having to hunt for themes and then have to modify them to work with wpmu.

Could everyone please send me a copy of any theme that you have 100% working with wpmu to andrew (a:T) idtstudios.com.

Thanks guys

tailoring themes to wpmu seems to be a very involved process, esp if you want to support plugins, widgets, etc, allow users to customise stuff (themes with admin menus), making sure those menus do not introduce vulnerabilities, etc etc!!!!

ARGH.

yep, that's why i'm trying to put together a bunch of themes so it will be easier for a beginner to have a nice set of themes. :)

I guess the problem (not really aproblem, just a head-scratch) I have in doing this is almost all themes I've tried using with WPMU "work" right on install. Wouldn't the modifications depend on what plugins each site would have? And if everyone is including the same plugins, a sidebar editor or widgets for example, then why not have it bundled in with the WPMU distribution?

I've got around sixty themes in my install, mostly from that zip that was floating around these forums. The only mod I could see to them was a line of code added to check for the sidebar editor plugin, and it didn't have the needed se file in each theme either, which I had to add.

I've even added my own themes, which work in 1.5, 2.0 and up in regular WP and the only things I had to modify to any of them were for things like whatever plugins I wanted it to use - something I would have had to do to any theme, on any of my various WPMU or WP installs.

But hey, if what you're really asking is for some modded themes that have the if/else calls for the more popular plugins, then I'm all over it. :D I'm supposed to be cleaning up my site's themes right now. Might as well benefit everyone else too.

I'm hoping to make two bundles. One with just with themes that work out of the box and one with widgets support. I'm looking to have 100 to 150 themes in each bundle when all is said and done. Both bundles will contain the same themes, one just won't have widgets support. This way if someone decides to add widgets later on down the road they can just wipe the themes directy clean and upload the widget bunndle and everything will go smoothly.

My plan is to gather all the themes that everyone sends my way and then go through and manually add widget support to each one. The reason i'm asking everyone to send me the themes instead of getting them myself is that I want to ensure that they work with wpmu.

I plan on publishing a list of everyone who sends themes so if you help out you'll get credit. :)

Themes with widget support should work even without widgets. So you'll only need 1 bundle then :)

Woot! :D Your idea is making me drool.
If I can get widgets working in my install, will do.

Actually, as I comb through, I'll make sure to send you the non-widgetized ones as well.

(Yeah, I'm testy over a few themes that have a "nav bar" in the header with hardcoded links to pages in it. Argh.)

I'm also working on a plugin to allow users to customise the images and colours in their themes. It's still very raw but there's a working prototype on my site.

Maybe we should be ultra selective on which themes to include and that way the collection will be a high quality one (accessible, secure, scalable, etc etc). That way users can have high quality themes they are able to heavily customise.

Also note that the Fauna theme has been working OOB, but I could not get the Regulus theme to play nice with it, nor could I get Regulus to work on MU. (feel free to prove me wrong on that one, though)

Both of those themes I mentioned have an admin panel.

Want me to post a list of sites that carry WP themes? I'd limit it to places that listed a LOT, not individual developers.

andrea_r,

I can get the themes fairly easily it's just knowing whether they work with wpmu out of the box or not is the problem. That's where you guys come in. :) You guys have the users to tell you whether or not the theme is working correctly.

Hopefully all themese will start to be created with widget support. Widgets are going to be such an important plugin I wouldn't be surprised if they made it into the core sometime soon...

yes the 'customisable' themes with admin panels are problematic. first and foremost are xss issues as lots of them don't bother filtering the user input (they were, afterall, not made with MU in mind). secondly, the popular 'theme toolkit' used by many theme authors appears to work with MU but is actually slightly broken and requires some modification (it thinks MU is WP 1.5 and registers itself as a plugin which causes all sorts of undesirable behaviour).

amanzi: ditto!

Okay, I know Andrew said email him, but I'd like someone to test this theme out first (besides, he's sick). We widgetized Anthurium Mix and added our own admin panel, NOT Ohz's Theme Toolkit one.

Download the zip.

It's reddish-orange, fixed-width, 2 columns and you can flip the sidebar from left to right as well as change the font & sizes. FWIW, it look like the original designer doesn't have it on her site anymore, and there was no license in the theme. We assume GPL then? :)

need i the widgets plugin.. or works it without any changes..

and if i install the widget plugin, what happens to the "normal" skin.. is there then a error or how looks it..?

It should work if you don't have the widgets plugin.

If you get the widgets plugin later, it doesn't screw up the layout. Widgets off / widgets on, looks the same.

(wax off, wax on, grasshopper)

Someone let me know how they like the admin panel. (please :) )

i will test and translate it to german tomorrow ;)

then i will report

regards

Stefan