Themes, Themes, Themes
This afternoon i set myself the task of adding in a set of extra themes to spice up the blogs that (i hope) are soon to come here. But of course, when you set yourself a daily goal, what invariably happens is that things keep happening that stop you from completing it! I’d picked out a few themes yesterday, and so it was just a case of uploading them all and customising them a little to fit the needs of OIOblogger.
The first few themes went smoothly enough - upload, add appropriate links, tidy up design a little, check for cross-browser compatibility…all going great I thought to myself. A few seconds later, i was looking at a blank screen, as a storm took out the power to my local area. Slightly frustrated by this, i waited a few hours for the electricity to be restored (during which team the power came on briefly twice, only to vanish again as quickly as it had come!). Once power was properly restored, i went back to work…
Unfortunately the next theme failed to look as nice as i’d hoped, and so a bit of sprucing up on my part was required. I do all my initial visual confirmation in FireFox, and after 15 minutes i was happy with how it looked, and so quickly flipped over to the (accursed) MS Internet Explorer to check it out. Nope, it wasn’t going to work, the page came to a sharp halt half way down, and refused to render further. Thinking it was the shoddy way IE likes to interpret CSS files, i decided this partiular was better left until another day. Having clicked on the don’t display this theme icon, i was back on my way; a grand total of 5 themes added in a little over 4 hours!
I added another 10 or so after that, and then took what i thought (you may disagree) was a well earned break, having accomplished very little. But some of them do look quite good, and all so far have been adapted to allow for customised user sidebars, and a few allow for color and image changes within the theme admin menu. I also have up and running a user theme editor, where it would be possible for users to create and maintain their own local copy of a blog theme, for complete customisation. I can’t use it yet, as giving users the ability to write and execute php code is not something i want! Might see about just limiting it to CSS file creation in the future, as a middle-ground solution.
Anyway, the core themes should all be up and running by tomorrow i hope, so that will be one less thing to do later on. I’ll throw in the usual Registration link at this point, feel free to test run a blog at any time!
Screenshots on the way soon!