Updating VectorLover Theme

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers, Web Design, WordPress

I’ve been post­ing notes about this under New Look, but fig­ured all the changes deserved their own post. Since I’m going to keep updat­ing this post with new infor­ma­tion until I decide not to, I’m mark­ing this as a sticky post and hid­ing the real changes below the fold. Addi­tional note: I’m doing the vast major­ity of this work over at my devblog, so it may be some time until the changes show up here.

UPDATE: I’ve removed the sticky set­ting from this post, as I’ve com­pleted all the work I intend to do for now on this theme. Lastly, I’ve setup a page where any new infor­ma­tion on VectorLover2 will be released and I will be post­ing a zip file of VL2 there for peo­ple inter­ested in my ver­sion of the theme.

CHANGELOG

  • Inte­grated the Now-Reading plugin.
  • Inte­grated the FAl­bum plugin.
  • Added Edit links to all posts/pages, avail­able to the admin only.
    • For­mated the Edit links (includ­ing com­ment edit links) to be in red text and dis­play the pen­cil icon from famfamfam’s Silk Icons.
  • Changed RSS & Admin login links in header to use icons (again from famfamfam’s Silk Icons).
  • Added hCard micro­for­mat­ting to both post & com­ment authors.
  • Added a stylesheet for print­ing which removes the side­bar and the com­ment form.
  • Wrapped posts in addi­tional DIV using post_class() to add sup­port for fancy styling on sticky posts.
    • Tech­ni­cally, I can do a lot more then just styling the sticky posts, but that was the moti­va­tion to do it.
    • Redid my imple­men­ta­tion of this to allow for back­wards com­pat­i­bilty. Ran across that tip while search for more info on styling sticky posts.
  • Altered the body tag on the index.php page of vectorlover21 to con­di­tion­ally have an id added to allow for spe­cific styling on just the home page.
  • Changed footer credit to link to the home page of the site.
  • Changed page titles to dis­play as “Post­Ti­tle « Blog­Name” vs the pre­vi­ous “Blog­Name » Post­Ti­tle” which I pre­fer the look of.
    • Espe­cially when I see my posts show up in Google’s search results.
  • Inte­grated Tweet­backs plugin.
    • Only inte­grated with pre-WordPress 2.7 comments
  • Imple­mented Word­Press 2.7’s Enhanced Com­ment Dis­play fea­tures.
  • Fixed Logout link in comments.php to work with Word­Press 2.7
  • Added cus­tom “default” gra­vatar image.
  • Changed “Read More” links to only show on front page when I use split an entry and hide some of it behind a link.
  • Inte­grate Tweet­backs plu­gin with Word­Press 2.7 enhanced com­ment dis­play features.
  • Build-in cus­tom login page
  • Devel­oped spe­cial styling for sticky posts now that they should be appear­ing at the top of my home page.
    • It’s not exactly how I want it, but it’s good enough for now.  I’d rather the sticky posts get writ­ten to the home page with a dif­fer­ent struc­ture (vs hid­ing bits with CSS) but while I did find this arti­cle with some info on doing just that, my PHP-fu isn’t strong enough to get it to work right now.
  • Added a sec­ond “side­bar” in down at the bot­tom of the page to dis­play more wid­gety goodness
    • The styling of the Footer side­bar isn’t per­fect, but it’s good enough.
  • Altered RSS links & com­ment form as sug­gested by Brand­ing Rant to setup & track goals.
    • Decided to scrap this idea for now, espe­cially as after reread­ing Brand­ing Rant’s arti­cle and notic­ing it wants Google’s javascript at the top of the page rather than the bot­tom  (which can neg­a­tively affect page load­ing times). Changed my mind on this after read­ing Rob’s com­ment.

TODO

  • Fig­ure out where the orig­i­nal author got the icons for Vec­torLover from (they look like an icon pack I’ve seen but can’t remem­ber where).
    • Appears to be the Vec­tor icon set from mono­fac­tor, unfortunately:
      • I no longer remem­ber exactly why I wanted to know this.
      • The icon set was released as a sin­gle Adobe Illus­tra­tor file, which nei­ther Gimp or Inkscape can open cor­rectly (some of the gra­di­ents are screwed up).

1 The utterly orig­i­nal name I’ve given to my revi­sion of VectorLover.

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About Mark McKibben

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

8 January 2009 | 10:55AM | Comments (8)

8 Comments

  1. Mark says:
    January 16th, 2009 at 6:59 am

    Just noticed my inte­gra­tion of the Tweet­backs plu­gin is mak­ing all ping & track­backs appear as tweets. So I’ll have to fix that.

    Reply to this Comment
  2. Mark says:
    January 17th, 2009 at 9:50 pm

    Changed how I inte­grated Tweet­backs to fix the pre­vi­ous problem.

    Reply to this Comment
  3. Mark says:
    January 27th, 2009 at 2:50 pm

    Test­ing some stats track­ing on comments.

    Reply to this Comment
  4. Rob Kingston says:
    January 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    Thanks for the men­tion, Mark. I just thought I’d clear things up — if your pages load quickly enough, then hav­ing Google Ana­lyt­ics track­ing down the bot­tom shouldn’t matter.

    Gab Gold­en­berg at SEOROI.com uses GA goal track­ing for his RSS sub­scrip­tions and his track­ing code sits at the bot­tom of his site. So, as long as the track­ing code loads before the user per­forms the action, it will work.

    I use the code at the top because some of my pages take a while to load and my Sub­scrip­tion but­ton at the top may be clicked before the track­ing code loads. Hope that helps, Mark.

    PS. In case you need more con­vinc­ing: http://www.brandingrant.com/benefits-tracking-rss-comments-analytics-wordpress.html . Look­ing for­ward to hear­ing from your horde of robotic pirate-ninja monkeys.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      January 29th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

      I had started try­ing out your tip on com­ments and while I don’t get a lot of com­ments, I wasn’t see­ing the goal being met (fig­ured hav­ing the script at the bot­tom broke it).

      After read­ing your com­ment, I double-checked my ana­lyt­ics account and saw it was work­ing. So your com­ment was a help, thanks for stop­ping by and leav­ing it!

      Reply to this Comment
  5. tul­lio says:
    February 8th, 2010 at 9:09 pm

    hi,
    appre­ci­ate your work, i istalled your ver­sion alreary ( as see on the web­site)
    i need to hide the date , do you think it can work like i did?.

    also i can’t under­stand why wp man­ager don’t let me add the meta widget.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      February 9th, 2010 at 6:52 am

      If I under­stand you cor­rectly, then you should be able to hide the date using a bit of CSS such as .ec3_schedule {display:none;}.

      As for not being able to add the meta wid­get, I’ve no idea. If you’re get­ting some sort of error when you try, per­haps you could do some inter­net search­ing to find if any­body else has received and fixed sim­i­lar errors.

      Reply to this Comment

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