Month: November 2008

Simplish version 2.1.3

Posted by Josh – November 27, 2008

Another little gift for the holiday: Here’s a new production edition of Simplish. This is the one you should be using on your real site, you know, where you don’t run pre-release software like Simplish 2.1.4RC, or WordPress 2.7-beta…

Version 2.1.3 is a tiny update that contains just one change: a contributed header background graphic (thanks to both Anonymous and Demetris) that’s 10x smaller than the original, down from ~2.7 Kilobytes to a super-slender 256 Bytes.

In other words, this update is definitely not a big deal. But it does trim the theme’s only image down to a size smaller than… most of your blog posts, and might help (a very little bit) with bandwidth or page load times if you’re using Simplish on a very-busy site.

Download Simplish version 2.1.3 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

Threadbare no longer (Simplish 2.1.4RC)

Posted by Josh – November 27, 2008

As mentioned in comments on my original mild objection, I’ve been convinced that threaded discussions, new in the upcoming WordPress version 2.7, are a good value at the price. So today I slapped support for the feature into Simplish. This version of the theme should be considered “beta” quality, just like the new WordPress features on which it’s built. Both are subject to change before final release.

Demo
http://labs.utopian.net/who/josh/wp-svn/?p=1
Code
simplish-2.1.4RC.tgz

The demo shows a “jacob’s ladder” style for the comments/replies layout, where both left and right margins are indented per-thread-level. It’s an (experimental) attempt to ease the “comment chaos” feeling a deeply-threaded discussion can give.

A special thanks to Otto for his comments and his indispensable threaded comments getting-started doc.
More…

About Versions and Fixes

Posted by Josh – November 17, 2008

We have a very-roughly monthly release schedule, and as our infrequently-honored date of the 20th approaches, the fix I have is a good one, but the only one: Anonymous contributed to the sibling sp theme a new background header image in PNG form at just 10% of the original’s size.

If there are other corners we could tidy, let us know with a comment here – that includes providing specific examples for the reported issue with some AJAX sidebar widgets and Simplish v2.1.2, as well as the question about the importance of threaded comment support -vs- the simplicity of loading no JavaScript.

Sunday Sighting – Inte en jävla blogg

Posted by Josh – November 16, 2008

Very nifty rework of the simple Simplish base into the theme on Inte en jävla blogg. I don’t read Swedish, but I know cupcakes make me happy, too!

From what I can make out from systrans and Briannatrans, the author had a good day at work. Good for her, and nice work on that theme, too.

Not about JavaScript

Posted by Josh – November 15, 2008

In a context completely unrelated to “threaded” discussion comments on blog posts, Rob Pike once wrote:

Threads are like salt. I like salt, you like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta than salt.

Implementing (what will eventually be) WordPress 2.7′s new threaded comments is not difficult, and doing so yields a moderately useful new organization element: threading, or individual replies, similar to the presentation of discussion forums, many newsreaders, the Gmail message list, or the Twitter @. This post by Ottodestruct has plenty of info to get you started against the latest subversion tip to get threaded comments working in your theme.

Many themes are built with, even around, JavaScript. If Simplish already loaded even one script, we’d certainly add the cool new threads. But Simplish is supposed to be simple, and it is supposed to be a feature that the theme loads no JavaScript in a default configuration.

I will probably link to a quick alpha Simplish with cut-and-paste test code for a threaded comments template shortly, but I’m interested in opinions right now.