Month: October 2018

Spooky! A Halloween theme adoption

Carolina

Last year, I released a Christmas theme, and I wanted to create a holiday theme this year as well. While I was considering a name for my new theme, I found a theme in the WordPress.org theme directory called Spooky, that had not been updated since 2009. I thought this was a great name for Halloween, and that it would be fun to see if I could revive it.

So I found the contact information to the themes creator, Esther, from webmatter.de in the themes readme file, and to my surprise, she soon replied back and said yes, I could adopt the theme!

To adopt a theme, you need to change the username of the author in the back end of the WordPress.org theme directory. So In order to do that, I contacted the Team Leads of the WordPress.org Theme Review Team who quickly transferred the theme over to my account.

When testing the original theme, I discovered a lot of PHP warnings, because of course it did not have any of the functions that have been added to WordPress in the last 9 years, that we take for granted today.

Because I only had a few days to spare before the holiday, I decide I would not be able to keep any of the original code and rewrite it, so instead, I started over with a fresh copy of underscores.

A screenshot of the original theme

But I definitely wanted to keep the theme in the same style, with the black background, grey text colors with orange details, a castle in the footer, and a moon at the top. 

I already had the moon that I could borrow from the Bunny theme, and I went through many of the Halloween themed images on pixabay before I chose this image for the footer:

I edited out the second moon behind the castle and also added some gradients to the themes footer and header area. In the end, I opted out of the sidebar so that it would be easier to use the wide and full width alignments in Gutenberg.

I tested a large number of menus with different spider animations, until I chose the narrower drop down menu with the cobwebs.

I am still struggling with getting the animations to work on Ipad, so if you have any tips, please e-mail me 🙂

For the screenshot, I choose The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe.

The Screenshot of the new version of the theme

For 3 days of developing and testing, I am still pretty happy with how it turned out.

The downside to adopting a theme is that if the theme was already live, -as was the case for Spooky; it wont be on the latest themes list on WordPress.org.

If you want to dress up your blog for Halloween, you can download the theme here.

The theme as one menu, a footer widget area, support for full width images with the Gutenberg editor, and an orange and yellow color palette. There is also a color option in the customizer where you can replace the orange accent color.

Updates for Star

Carolina #

Star is one of my oldest themes and it now has basic support for the new editor. Because this theme has an optional sidebar, the theme will not have support for full width and wide content.

Version 1.11 is a maintenance update and it is the first update for this theme in 2018.

Changelog:

  • Housekeeping: Updated links. Updated credits in the readme file.
  • CSS and PHP code style changes according to WordPress coding standards.
  • Added a rtl stylesheet and print style.
  • Added various theme support for the new editor.
  • Added a link to the privacy policy page in the footer.
  • Updated screenshot.

Changelog for Embla 0.8

Carolina

Version 0.8,   October 12 2018 

  • Made more functions pluggable to make it easier to create child themes.
  • Style improvements to match the theme with the new and the classic editor, and for BBPress and Jetpack.
  • Made sure that longer post titles does not overflow the post area, but displays over multiple rows instead.
  • Changed the post pagination style to wrap over 3 lines on mobile/handheld devices to make the clickable areas larger and since the longer line sometimes created a scroll.
  • Removed blocks.css, the styles are now part of style.css
  • Housekeeping: Validated html, updated links.

Aaron is getting ready for the new editor

Carolina # #

Two months ago, I finally started the process of creating new demos for some of my existing themes. But after seeing very little actually being done 😉 I have realised I need a better plan for which themes I want to continue working on.

The first theme that has recieved an update in preparation for Gutenberg, and a new demo and information page, is Aaron.

While I continue the testing together with a couple of my theme users, you can expect several smaller updates to fine tune the styling. I want the editor and the front to match, but I still want it too look and feel like the same theme.

I am generally a fan of Gutenberg -I am writing this post on my mobile, with the plugin installed - but the frequent changes has not made it easy for theme developers.

The following changes were made in version 3.2 of Aaron:

  • Made sure that the custom templates works for all pages, not only for the front page.
  • Made sure that the meta box options works with the Jetpack portfolio and testimonial post formats.
  • Added a testimonial widget. This widget requires the Jetpack testimonial functionality to be activated. (This widget is the same widget that has been added to some of my more recent themes)
  • Made sure that the excerpt_more filter returns the default value in the admin.
  • Included a footer link to the privacy policy page, if one is set up.
  • Minor style changes:
  • A left side border was added to the blockquote.
  • A border was removed from the footer widgets.
  • Matched font and styles used in the gutenberg editor.
  • I also updated the screenshot, to follow the new guidelines for the theme directory.

Version 3.3 is scheduled for mid october and will mostly be style changes.

If you have any suggestions and ideas for Aaron, you can email me or use the support forum.