Updating VectorLover Theme

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.
  • Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7 has been very helpful with this.
• 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.