BytesForAll WordPress Themes

With this version more than 30 bugs have been fixed since the initial 3.0 release. New in this version 3.1.7:

• there were no next/previous comments links on the first page of comments in WP 2.7
• the “added backslashes” in post footers started appearing again in the last release
• the Archives page didn’t work right
• WP-Postratings is a new item than can be used in Post Info Items. It was planned long ago but didn’t work in the last few releases.
• a few more small bits and pieces

I tested this release with the following plugins, all turned on at once in WP 2.7: Business Directory, Commentluv, FeedBurner FeedSmith, Get Recent Comments, LMB^Box Comment Quicktags, Sociable, Subscribe To Comments, WP-EMail, WP-PageNavi, WP-PostRatings, WP-PostViews, WP-Print, WP-Syntax and WPG2

NOTE: To escape literal strings inside of dates in post info items, a hash sign # must be used now instead of a backslash.

How To update from 3.x: Upload the theme and overwrite any existing theme files. (if you made manual edits to theme files, you’d have to re-apply them). Existing theme option settings would keep working.
How To update from 2.x: Upload the theme like another new theme. It will co-exist with 2.x. Select the new theme in the WordPress admin area.

UPDATE: 3.1.8 released – CLICK HERE for the new version

Discuss the theme at the BFA Forums or leave a comment here.

December 26th, 2008 • Comments (95)

UPDATE: 3.1.8 released – CLICK HERE for the new version

December 23rd, 2008 • Comments (32)

About 20 errors fixed, Archives page and a few screenshots added to the admin pages. I’ll add a changelog tomorrow. Visit http://forum.bytesforall.com to discuss the theme or leave a comment here.

UPDATE: Downloads #1-20 had one remaining error: checking/unchecking sidebars on/off wouldn’t stick. This is fixed in the download below – version 3.1.1

UPDATE: 3.1.7 released – CLICK HERE for the new version

If you cannot save the theme options for seemingly mysterious reasons please see http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=39 for a fix – your host probably has the PHP security add-on “Suhosin” installed . I’ll reduce the amount of currently ~215 separate options to less than the PHP-Suhosin default (max of 200 variables per post request) by arranging some options into groups (arrays), in the next version 3.2.

December 18th, 2008 • Comments (31)

I am sorry that this took so long, and feel honored that some people were actually waiting for this.

Please note: It is entirely possible that this version 3.0 has errors. It is a complete rewrite. A version 3.1 may have to follow after I collected enough feedback/error reports etc.

Upgrading from Atahualpa 2 or other versions: Atahualpa 3’s directory name is “atahualpa3” and the option names start with “bfa_ata_”. That means that you can run your existing and this new version of Atahualpa simultaneously. Upload and activate Atahualpa 3 like another, new theme.

In the theme preview screen in the WP admin area Atahualpa 3 may look broken, it works fine “on air” though. I will fix this in 3.1.

At wp262.bytesforall.com and wp27b2.bytesforall.com you can preview the theme but I never intended to change too much on the outside. Use Atahualpa 3 and its 20+ admin pages as a base for your own theme creation.

I opened a forum, too and would like to take the theme discussions over there. Even with threading and paging the comments get confusing. Registration takes only about 20 seconds

Visit the BFA Forum

Version 3.0 has several bugs. See current state. Feel free to download and preview the theme but a fixed version 3.1 is coming Dec 19th 2008

UPDATE: 3.1.7 released – CLICK HERE for the new version

Atahualpa Features:

Atahualpa 3 is a WordPress Theme Framework that mimics the look of Atahualpa 2.2 in its default configuration.

• Works (well) on all popular browsers with at least 0.5% market share, as of Nov 2008, Hitslink Browser Market Share
• FIXED width, FLUID width and HYBRID width (fluid width with min/max width boundaries)
• WP 2.7 ready: Fully working threaded and paged comments
• Drop down menus for pages and categories
• Localized frontend and backend. A atahualpa.pot file is included however no actual translations are included at this time.
• Turn each sidebar on/off based on page type (Home, Category, Page, Single, Archives…), page (ID) or category (ID).
• Valid XHTML Strict, clean, documented code, JavaScript effects degrade gracefully.
• Works well for publishing CODE i.e. with WP Syntax. Code areas get a fluid width and will use all available space but not expand the layout, avoiding horizontal scrollbars as long as possible.
• Handles oversized content very well: Oversized images (oversized for the given growser viewport) get resized and unbreakable strings (extreme long words or other strings without any space) get wrapped – even in fluid layouts. (In Firefox 2 a long string will overflow, in Firefox 3 it’ll wrap if it contains a non-alphanumeric character.)
• 4 custom widgets included: Recent Comments, Popular Posts, Popular Posts In This Cat, Subscribe (NEW)
• Subscribe widget with integrated Feedburner “Subscribe by Email” form
• Over 100 configuration options: Build unique section headings, bylines and footers for posts and pages, configure the site footer, the \”read more\” tag, the next/previous navigation and many more.
• Style every area of the layout with borders, colors, fonts and spaces without ever caring about the not so funny layout related side of CSS.
• HTML/CSS Inserts: Insert code into the website, such as Google Analytics or your own CSS styles, without editing the theme.
• Styled tables, plus zebra stripes and hover effect for rows for all or individual tables.
• Styled form input fields and buttons, plus focus effect and pre-filled text for form fields.
• Header image(s) now optionally clickable, this will add an invisible clickable layer over the image
• All header image effects can be combined (Opacity, Overlayed Blog Title, Clickable)
• Plug & play for the plugins Subscribe to Comments, Paged Comments, LMB Box Comment Quicktags, WP-PageNavi, WP-Email, WP-Print, WP-PostViews and
  Sociable. Tested with WP Super Cache, WP Cache 2 and WP-Syntax.

Fixed or improved:

• Menus in the sidebars had an inconsistent look across browsers depending on whether list elements had one link, one link with text or several links (recent comments).
• Almost all CSS styles in an external file now and not in header.php anymore
• Less files: No page.php, single.php, archives.php, archive.php, search.php, sidebar.php, sidebar2.php etc… Almost everything is in index.php now for easier maintenance.

Credits:

• Most included favicons and icons were made of the Nuvola Icon Set of David Vignoni aka Icon King and the Silk Icon Set of Mark James aka FamFamFam
• The drop down menus are modified versions of Ruthsarian’s cross-browser rmenu
• Various effects and the IE6 image max-width fix were made with jQuery

December 11th, 2008 • Comments (51)

UPDATE 10-11-2008: PLEASE BEAR WITH ME WHILE I AM SLOW WITH ANSWERING QUESTIONS. I *really* want to bring this update out of the door, and it’s been quite a bit of work… 

If you’re just starting out with the Atahualpa theme hold on before doing too many customizations and wait for the next version which I’ll release within a few days. This took longer than expected but it’s coming to an end now.

It will have drop down menus and a new layout technique without the “dropping sidebar” issue. Also theme options broken down into several pages, fixed, fluid and hybrid width (fluid within min/max boundaries) a few fixes and localization. It’s a complete re-write and most customization tips posted on this site will not work/apply anymore or won’t be required anymore.

I will also try to answer the remaining questions within this week.

October 2nd, 2008 • Comments (93)

Just stumbled over the download link for Google’s first own browser named “Chrome“. It seems to be pretty standards compliant. Wraps long strings, knows max-width and min-width, everything looks alright but I have not tested it much. One browser more to test sites on in the future but it looks like Google is NOT going to annoy web developers with strange behavior and whatnot.

One new feature is that the tabs work separately, so one tab with a broken site shouldn’t be able to lock up the whole browser. That’s something the new IE8 is going to have, too, but the Beta 2 of IE8 did not wrap long strings, and didn’t resize images either, when I tested it, even though IE7 does both. Quite a disappointment but probably due to being Beta still. Another feature of “Chrome” is, you can have “anonymous” tabs (where cookies etc won’t be saved) while surfing “officially” in other tabs – at the same time.

Will be interesting to see how the browser market shares are going to look in the near future. I guess “Chrome” is going to be a big success, and that it will hurt Firefox.

Just letting you know that existing and new themes will be tested in “Chrome”, too, from now on, in addition to Firefox 2 & 3, IE 6, 7 (and soon 8), Opera 9 and Safari 3. (I test in IE5 and 5.5, too, but don’t see them as mandatory considering their very small market share)

September 2nd, 2008 • Comments (7)

I will have to postpone the custom color stylesheet because Atahualpa may be getting some color related changes under the hood. Sorry

Other things I am working on, in no particular order:

• A new theme, very solid and browser-safe, 2-3 col fluid width with minimal design footprint as a base to build your own theme, or to use as is. No options page, no javascript, no images, no custom functions, but widget & Gravatar ready. The whole theme is only around 10 kb big and consists of only 4 files (index.php, comments.php, functions.php and style.css) instead of the ~20 files a WP Theme usually has.
• Update for “Montezuma” with a lot of color options and probably a few jquery javascript effects and maybe multi page options page.
• Update for “Cats Drop Down“, more focus on Adwords ads automation.
• The theme that this site is currently running on is a new theme that I’ll release soon. It has dynamic flash blog titles and optionally sidebar titles too, 28 flashified fonts included in the theme. It’s all transparent to search engines and no-flash-no-javascript users. Those, and the search engines, will see the regular h1 / h3 html titles. Multi page options page, multi level drop down/fly out menus, rotating headers and some more. It’s not finished yet in its current state as you see it right now.
• Another Atahualpa update will come at some point but among all the little possible improvements I collected so far nothing serious has emerged yet so there’s no hurry. And I certainly don’t want to make another release every other day. Leave the sidebar contents enough room to breathe and follow the instructions regarding min-width setting (options page) and there should be no issues.

August 26th, 2008 • Comments (101)

Please consider voting for this theme at WordPress.org:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/atahualpa

Test Drive Atahualpa 2.21

Changelog v. 2.21

• Had to fix one error in the BFA Recent Comments widget: The blog owner would be linked with a broken link, instead of not being linked at all. Fixed in v. 2.21
• Several users reported a “headers already sent” problem probably related to blank spaces (just spaces, not lines) at the end of functions.php. I had not seen that one as it doesn’t seem to occur on every WP setup. Fixed in v. 2.21

If you’re one of the 37 people that downloaded 2.2, and don’t want to upgrade to 2.21, do this: In /wp-content/themes/atahualpa2/functions/bfa_recent_comments.php add the following line at line 197 (below the line that’s already there and looks similar):

$output = preg_replace("/<a href="\&quot;http:\/\/\&quot;(.*?)">(.*?)/i","\\2",$output);</a>

This looks weird but when you copy & paste it, the huge spaces should be back to normal.

Additionally, as a 2.2 (and not 2.21) user, if you see that “headers already sent” issue, and don’t want to upgrade to 2.21, remove the 50 or so blank spaces at the very last line (line 572) of functions.php. There should be nothing, no space and no blank lines, after that last

<?php } ?>

Both issues mentioned above are fixed in 2.21.

Changelog v. 2.2

• MANY little fixes and improvements. Just about everything that was mentioned or suggested in the 80+ comments of the last release post is fixed or included.
• Using v. 2.01’s SEO functions along with a SEO plugin such as All-in-one-SEO might mess up your meta tags and might affect your google rankings. The new version Atahualpa 2.2 will check for All-in-one-SEO and 11 other SEO plugins and deactivate its own SEO functions if a third party SEO plugin is installed. Additionally you now will have to explicitely activate the Atahualpa SEO options.
• No hardcoded areas anymore in the right sidebar for related post, popular posts, recent comments, actually no hardcoded anything anymore, anywhere.
• Instead, there are 3 new widgets included in the theme now. BFA Recent Comments, BFA Popular Posts and BFA Popular in Cat (Popular posts in the given category). They will install automatically. You don’t need to do anything. Check out the Recent Comments widget.
• The plugin “Related Posts” is not included or integrated anymore. I couldn’t turn it into a widget for now quickly enough. Please feel free to install that plugin or another one, i.e. “Similar Posts” on your own.
• Several additonal options on the options page. Especially the header area can be modified quite a bit now.
• Cleaned up the code considerably. You should now be able to edit the CSS on your own. The PHP code got a bit more complicated though due to the localization.
• Localization not finished yet but should be in the next version.
• WPMU users can upload header images and a logo icon, too
• Print styles integrated. Even if you don’t install WP-Print, visitors will still get a decent print version of any of your pages if they choose to print out a page through their browser’s print function. Header, Footer, Sidebars, and a few things from the middle column will be removed, and links underlined, when a page is being printed. In Firefox (only) the URLs of links will be printed out, too.

August 24th, 2008 • Comments (392)

I should have Atahualpa 2.2 ready Friday or Saturday, in worst case Sunday 8-24-2008. Basically all remaining issues and suggestions that were brought up in the comments of the release post for Atahualpa 2.0 / 2.01 will have been dealt with.

August 20th, 2008 • Comments (27)