VectorLover 2

Posted by Mark

Vec­torLover started out as a XHTML/CSS tem­plate cre­ated by Erwin Aligam. The design was good enough that it got a men­tion in Smash­ing Mag­a­zine and it was later ported to Word­Press by Theme­Lab. I’m not sure when I first ran across the theme, but I’m think­ing it before WordPressv2.7 was released. I installed the theme and have been using here at Cof­fee­Bear ever since. Then when Word­Press v2.7 was released and some new fea­tures were included (e.g. enhanced com­ments); I decided I’d try updat­ing Vec­torLover to include those new fea­tures. Along the way, I learned a few tricks and found some nifty plu­g­ins which I incor­po­rated into the new ver­sion of the theme.

License

In keep­ing with the spirit of the orig­i­nal designer, I’m releas­ing VectorLover2 under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 License1. This means that you are free:

  • to copy, dis­trib­ute, dis­play, and per­form the work
  • to make deriv­a­tive works
  • to make com­mer­cial use of the work

Under the fol­low­ing conditions:

  • You must attribute the work in the man­ner spec­i­fied by the author or licen­sor. (In this case, a link back to my site)
  • For any reuse or dis­tri­b­u­tion, you must make clear to oth­ers the license terms of this work
  • Any of these con­di­tions can be waived if you get per­mis­sion from the copy­right holder

Fea­tures

  • Threaded com­ments with quick reply links.
    • Setup so it should grace­fully fall­back to WordPress’s old style com­ments if you are not run­ning at least Word­Press 2.7.
    • Note: Threaded com­ments is an optional thing. To enable them you must go into WordPress’s admin back­end -> Set­tings -> Dis­cus­sion and check the Enable threaded (nested) com­ments box.
  • Inte­grated plu­gin sup­port for: Now-Reading, FAl­bum, Tweet­backs, wpLi­cense, WP-PageNavi
  • Cus­tom login page
  • Added a new default Gra­vatar image to list of options under Set­tings -> Dis­cus­sion in WordPress’s admin backend.
  • hCard micro­for­mat­ting to both post & com­ment authors.
  • A stylesheet to remove unnec­es­sary ele­ments from printed pages.
  • Changed page titles to dis­play as “Post­Ti­tle « Blog­Name” vs the pre­vi­ous “Blog­Name » Post­Ti­tle” for bet­ter SEO
  • Wrapped posts in a DIV with post_class() to add sup­port for fancier styling on posts.
    • Setup so it should grace­fully ignore this if you are not run­ning at least Word­Press 2.7.
    • Cur­rently the only spe­cial­ized styling I’m includ­ing for use with this is for sticky posts.
      • Note: spe­cial­ized styling of sticky posts only dis­plays on the home page of the site.

ToDo

  • Rewrite wid­get code so it works prop­erly with Word­Press 2.8.x & up
  • Rework design of author pages to be more aes­thet­i­cally pleasing.
  • Break out author­box code into a sep­a­rate plugin.

Changelog

  • v0.9.5 — Mod­i­fied Google Ana­lyt­ics track­ing, so that logged in users will not trig­ger goals by sub­mit­ting com­ments or click­ing RSS links. Added an author­box to the bot­tom of indi­vid­ual posts (most use­ful for multi-author blogs).
  • v0.9.4 — Minor tweaks, inte­gra­tion of Cimy User Extra Fields for use with the new Author template.
  • v0.9.3 — Minor tweaks
  • v0.9.2 — Minor tweaks
  • v0.9.1 — Minor tweaks + inte­gra­tion of WP-PageNavi
  • v0.9.0 — Ini­tial release
  • v0.8.1 — Added wpLi­cense image & link to meta widget
  • v0.8.0 — Ini­tial customization

Down­load

  • Download Down­load Vect­loverLover 2 with Google Ana­lyt­ics Track­ing v0.9.5
    • Pre­con­fig­ured to track 3 dif­fer­ent goals
      • ‘/goal/comment.html/to track when com­ments are submitted.
      • ‘/goal/rss-nav.html’ to track when the RSS icon in the nav bar is clicked (and hope­fully sub­scribed to).
      • ‘/goal/rss-footer.html’ to track when the RSS icon in the meta wid­get is clicked (and hope­fully sub­scribed to).
  • Download Down­load Vec­torLover 2 v0.9.0 — NOTE: I’m no longer updat­ing the “ana­lyt­ics free” ver­sion of this theme, as I’m too bloody lazy to do so.

1 Please note this is a dif­fer­ent license than what I use on the rest of this site.

This work by Mark McKibben is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.