The various *border-radius CSS techniques for turning corners don’t command the obedience of wayward Internet Explorer. While we tested some special border-radius techniques for IE, corners there remain square. Level 2.1 CSS validators will squawk at bits of the new CSS, while browser-specific mutations of same add typographical insult to standards-abandoning injury. Still, we feel those bevels are pretty sporty.

Another appearance tweak removes the bottom border that formerly underlined h4 headings.

Download Simplish version 2.3 here (.zip, sha1:3f8255653b4215c82f704700185f04f806c73c83), or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

This change is tiny, but more details can be found in Issue #19 at the Simplish project site.

Download Simplish version 2.2.3 here (.zip, sha1:ac92c5a8d1168d69aafd94fa43c1dd880cac01ce), or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

Many thanks to Demetris for the bulk of the patches included, and vigorous testing with the WP_DEBUG setting, which now gives Simplish the all-clear.

Download Simplish version 2.2.2 here (.zip, sha1:ce3e147c277cdcb2aac934fd9f0ec2bd20b8f6af), or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

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.

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.

Notes

For the theme, threaded comments support kicks off in functions.php: a function ocomments() checks if comment threading is available in your WordPress install (i.e., if wp_list_comments() exists; e.g., if it is running on version 2.7 or greater). If not, the theme loads the 2.6-compatible “old” comments template (ocomments.php), and comments look and work with no changes from previous versions. If your WordPress supports threading, the theme loads the new threaded comments template.

From there control of the feature moves to header.php. Simplish loads the comment thread JavaScript only when needed: only if threaded comments are enabled in wp-admin, and then only on single post views. The script is not loaded on multiple- and archive pages where comments are not displayed.

In this execution path, single.php runs next, and that script includes the comments.php comments template. If there are comments on the post, comments.php eventually calls wp_list_comments() to echo the comments loop, producing the threaded result.

The JavaScript enqueued previously by header.php powers the AJAX-ified reply buttons and comment form. (Comment threading will work without this client-side script, but less smoothly.)

Bugs

There may be a few issues with paging threaded comments and reversing order from ascending to descending that can break “pretty” permalinks, as the page number is not always passed into links on comments page one. This issue, if it’s not just ephemera, appears to be a bug in wp_list_comments() and most easily patched there. [Conners 2008-12-12]

Wp_list_comments() produces some hCard classes in its comment loop output, but overall, comment author hCards and comment hAtom are less complete in this testing version than in previous versions of Simplish. To re-add the additional microformat stuff, we’ll filter wp_list_comments(), but this work isn’t started yet.

One place you won’t see threaded comments for a while is here at the Simplish site/blog, nor at the “official” Simplish Demo. Both are hosted on our WordPress-mu-based Labs/Blogs project on the stable version of the multi-blog WordPress software, and MU generally trails wp.org releases and features by a few weeks at least.

Simplish 2.1.4 is planned for final release in conjunction with WordPress version 2.7 — “real soon now.”

Happy [U.S.] Thanksgiving!

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.

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.