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.
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.
This release contains fixes for some minor bugs, and switches to relative (em) font sizing.
get_settings() call with bloginfo().n class (thanks Martin McEvoy @ weborganics.co.uk).em) rather than absolute (px) sizes, allowing resizing in IE6 (thanks op111.net).body element background-color (thanks op111.net).h1 element (no leading zero).Download Simplish version 2.1.2 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.
We focused on cleaner, more orderly CSS and some code factoring in this release. Visual changes are minor, but post metadata display is tighter, while line heights have been widened ever-so-slightly for easier readability in long text passages.
table and dl styles improved/added (adopted bits of Blueprint CSS).Download Simplish version 2.1.1 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.
Now that Mitchell Hashimoto has started up his outstanding Erlang notes and links blog spawn_link, I’ve already learned more about Erlang and how she is wrote than I ever knew – and we’ve been running ejabberd for remote developer chat for almost a year.
Of course I found spawn_link because it’s running Simplish – but I was subscribed to the feed before I left. Mitchell’s post about grouping program parts together into single-management-point units with Erlang’s application module was enlightening, and like a lot I learn about Erlang, describes runtime features that certainly evoke, if not replace, those of the operating system.
Anyway, this isn’t a post about Erlang, but about a cool site running the theme, so I’ll just say: Vive le CSP!
In Chrome like a Harley
Like everyone else, I wanted to check out Google’s latest. So today I grabbed the Chrome beta on a Vista virtual machine (still trying to get that taste out of my mouth) and flipped quickly through the pages of Simplish. Even on the beastly Vista, the multi-process-style Chrome has a light snappy feel. All things being relative in big, GUI apps, I’m not sure if it’s Chrome that’s fast, or just that my recent browser, Firefox, is so very slow.
Everything in the theme looked normal in Chrome’s WebKit to my (fairly distracted) eye, and that brings our tested browsers list to:
FreeBSD and Linux
Firefox 2, 3 (on various lunix); Konqueror… (on Kubuntu 8.0.4, which is KDE 3.5.x I think.)
Macintosh
Firefox 2, 3; Camino 1.6.x; Safari 3.1.x (all on Mac OS X v. 10.4.11)
Plan 9
Simplish degrades rather nicely in the basic Abaco native browser, and in the peripatetically cross-platform Inferno‘s Charon. I have posted simple test posts from Abaco, as well (though that’s nothing to do with the theme). ;-)
Windows
Internet Explorer 6 (Windows 2000), 7 (XP & Vista); Firefox 2, 3 (Vista); Safari 3 (Vista)
Simplish made an appearance on op111.net’s 5-theme shortlist for WordPress. I almost missed the trackback because I was moving the demo blog to make way for this space.
In the end, op111′s demetris chose to apply his own styling to Scott Wallick‘s excellent Sandbox theme. I came close to doing the same thing when I went looking for a snazzy ‘default’-kinda theme for Utopian.net’s use – and for my own blog at the Labs. I decided to adopt and update Kenny/Jeffrey‘s ScribbishWP, but since I started changing and departing from both ScribbishWP (in code) and Scribbish itself (in style), the plaintxt.org themes like Sandbox and blog.txt have inspired choices for Simplish. We even copy their code: the two basic hCard producer functions used in Simplish 2.0 are derived from blog.txt source (closely enough that Scott’s copyright has joined the NOTICE.)
op111′s list has some references to the many uses folks make of the Sandbox plus some chameleon CSS – Sandbox comes out of the box looking like 1995, but can be made into anything you can tweak into and copy out of Firebug. My favorite is still Sandbox co-creator Andy Skelton’s re-implementation of WordPress’s default/kubrick theme atop Sandbox.
About Versions and Fixes
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.