Subtle for WordPress

[...] still in the process of digging out of the weeds here, and I spent a good portion of yesterday working with Christopher Frazier of Glued Ideas to track down some bugs and display issues I was having with my [...]

I have just found Word Press and then came across your Subtle theme and love it. I’m trying to get my head around the whole blogging/word press thing and have a question. To edit the theme in WordPress I get the message that the folder isn’t writable. Could you help me to work out what to do, please? I’d really appreciate some help.

@Lorna – if you’re new to using WordPress and running a website, I’d suggest you steer clear of editing your theme files. If you’re not comfortable working with HTML, CSS and PHP, you’re going to have a rough time, especially using the WordPress template editor.

My suggestion is go with a pre-built theme (like Subtle) and just stick with it as-is while you learn the ropes. If you’re interested in going further, start first by learning basic web development and then jump into editing your theme files – offline and not through WordPress. You’ll be much happier with the process.

Thanks for your response Christopher, I seem to have got it going now.

I have been coding a website in notepad for a while, however it was just a personal playground to learn how to do it. Trouble was, I spent so much time writing code and debugging that I didn’t have much left over for content and creating. This is a whole new ballgame but once I get my head around everything it should make life easier.

I have my graphic up now, there was a problem trying to alter file permissions through my ftp client, but I have changed to Filezilla and this time it worked. Now I’m playing about and learning as I go. It was overwhelming at first, but it’s beginning to make sense. There’s so much to learn. It’s fun though.

Wonderful theme, exactly what i was looking for!
But i had a problem: in the pages i can’t see any box to leave a comment even if i had checked the option when i created the page. Instead, with normal posts i had no problem.

Take a look at my static page:
http://www.travelopedia.it/mappa/

I’m getting the following error message on my ’single’ page …
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: the_tags() in /home/creative/public_html/WordPress/wp-content/themes/gluedideas_subtle/single.php on line 62

@Lorna – the quick fix is to upgrade your WordPress install, but I’ll be adding error checking in the next day or so for people with older installs.

Thank you. My server is upgrading and moving my site to a new platform in the next couple of days, so I’ll see how that settles and try back here then, or upgrade WordPress if they haven’t done it for me.

Meantime I’ll read up on PHP at W3Schools online.

Thanks for the great theme. Using it right now on my site. I switched from K2.

Thanks for the great theme. I’ve been using it for over a year, and really love it. I was about to give up on it though, since each successive generation of WP seemed to make it harder to use. I’m glad the updates have resumed.

This is a great theme – thanks for sharing. How do I get a link to previous entries on the bottom of my blog?

If have an urgent bug report. I use 0.41 on my site and when someone post a comment to my site the comment is posted to the wrong post.

For example when posting to http://www.blogadresse.de/2007/04/29/ds-trimdrop-11/ the comment will go here http://www.blogadresse.de/2008/03/03/opendns/.

Please help!

@Jan – You’ll need to remove the “recent posts” widget from the single post sidebar. The widget breaks the page by making the last post in “recent posts” the current post. There isn’t a good fix for this other than not using this widget in the single sidebar.

Too many widget, that i can’t manage them simply. I am sorry i need some little tutorial about that widget, there is any?

Please see my network at http://www.phoenixblackbox.cn the ads only show at mainpage and unshown in page or single article.

But thanks for this theme and we need help.

Hi Christofer,

Thanks for a fine theme. Been using it for http://beamreach.org/blog and just tried using it anew on dreamhost.com via WP2.3.3 one-click install. All went smoothly until I tried uploading a custom header. Image made it into header.jpg and permissions were all open, but new header didn’t show up on home page (http://orcasphere.net)

Source revealed a bunch of %2F strings in the URL for the header image. My hack was to comment out two lines in the Subvert generator.php file so that the URL wasn’t built on the fly and replace with the static URL:

/* $sOutput .= ‘#header .style_content { background-image: url(‘ . $sStyleURL . ‘header.jpg); background-repeat: no-repeat; }’;*/
$sOutput .= ‘#header .style_content { background-image: url(http://www.orcasphere.net/wp/wp-content/themes/gluedideas_subtle/styles/Subvert/headers/header.jpg); background-repeat: no-repeat; }’

in file: wp/wp-content/themes/gluedideas_subtle/styles/Subvert/generator.php

Perhaps this is a bug, or just an ideosyncracy of my PHP/WP/etc?

Here’s what the generated source looked like prior to my hack:

And afterwards:

Hello,

I just downloaded your Subtle 0.41 and noticed that the search box is misaligned to the left into my post. For some reason, every other widget such as calendar, tag clouds, and links look out of place too. Got any ideas?

@pututik – There really are a ton of widget blocks, huh? The best thing I can tell you is to play with them using simple widgets and see what works for you. That’s more or less what I do.

@Scott – I’ve not seen this and it seems like it might be some weird characters in your paths. Lazy Geisha had a similar problem with spaces in the folder name. Did you have anything weird like that going on?

@Tom Chuong – Do you have a test installation we can look at?

I also could not get a new header image to upload for Subvert and I couldn’t get the “reset header” to even show the default header image. Thanks for the tip Scott… I just replaced the new generator.php file with my old v0.39 generator.php file and now it works correctly.

@Frazier: Your @Scott reply is targeting his setup, but I think the problem may lay with Subtle.

I had the issue as well and from what I can see the generator.php file in /styles/Subvert is totally different from the one in /styles/default; mainly in that default is referencing two additional images (header_menu.jpg/png) not found in Subvert.

If I plop the generator.php and the two header_menu images from /default into /Subvert, things start acting “right” other than the fact that the menu image it creates if fubar.

I’m not saying this is a fix, as it obviously isn’t when you try what I’m suggesting — it was just me playing around after reading Scott’s comment since I saw the same weirdness he reported (in fact my Subvert doesn’t have any image by default at all)…

Ah yes – I missed the part about it being in Subvert. Looks like a possible fix I was trying out didn’t get removed. thanks for the heads-up. For the time being, use your 0.39x generator.php and I’ll get an update in soon.

I’m so pleased to see your site up again. It was down all the time I was adapting subtle for Amsterdam Foodie so it is only now that I can thank you. I’ll take a look at the new code but I customised so much that perhaps it is not worth the pain of trying to merge the two.

Hi !
I think the theme is great. However I´m trying to build a site where I will be using a static fronpage. I want the blog to appear as a news page and not as the first page.
I am having trouble getting the menu to act correctly when I´m not using the blogpage as my first page. What files or settings do I need to change to get it working?
To further describe what is happening I´m using the Glued version of subtle and I can´t get the white rounded menu background to appear on my blogpage when I´m using a different page as the first page…
Am I making any sense?

/Mats

Great theme Chris.. Subtle really is awesome. 1 thing though, using WP 2.3.3 and the subvert theme option, my header img is being over-ridden by the theme’s style. Therefore the img doesn’t display although it’s in the appropriate style folder. Thanks again.

Sorry for the last comment, but I figured it out. Very simple fix in the /Subvert/ dir. Change the generator.php code, line 131 where it says urlencode to urldecode. The urldecode function decodes any %## encoding in the given string. No need to hard code or copy generator files. Chris, thanks again for a great theme. Can’t wait to play around with this some more. Best. Pete

@Pete – thanks for posting your fix. I’ll get an update into place this morning.

OK everyone – the install is fixed. Sorry that I missed that!

@Mats – Subtle’s home page link on the menu is hard-coded. You can cut it out, but without the hard-coding it doesn’t show up for normal users. You can change that without worrying about breaking the theme.

Chris,
Thanks for the excellent theme. I’ve used it for almost two years now. I really haven’t found anything I like better. Thanks for the recent update.

“Marking themes that don’t support tags as incompatible with WP 2.3 seems a little draconian.”

The compatibility page is a wiki, so Subtle 0.41 is now marked as compatible with WP 2.3.

Hi
is V 0.41 compatible with Wordpress 2.5?
And when will the Forum eventually be back online?

lg
Tomsn

@Simone – try adding the following code to the bottom of sdebar.php:

current_post–; setup_postdata($wp_query->next_post()); // Reset post data for comments ?>

That should sort your comments problem out..

First, to say thank you for this great theme. Is it working well with the latest wp, 2.5? I am using your theme and I would like to do the update for wp, but I wanted to be sure that everything is fine. Thanks.

@Vioan – I just downloaded a copy today and will try it out over the next couple of days. I’ll let you know what I find.

Hey Chris,

Just an FYI in case anyone wants to know before they upgrade — I upgraded to WP 2.5 yesterday and had no issues with Subtle. Works just fine.

nina

Hi, your theme is simply the best WP-theme I never seen (and I never used on my site)… however, in build 0.41 there’s something wrong.

With Firefox 2.0.0.13 (IE is working good) the homepage’s footer is shown not in a proger way but the other pages are ok. You can take a look at the problem on my website (if you can, if you want).

However, thank you again!

Fixed (even if I don’t know how)! Thank you again…

Very nice theme! However, there seems to be two odd errors, both to do with the footer in different browsers and I was wondering if you could shed some light on why this is happening.
First of all, in IE7 although the pages render fine, when there’s a post, sometimes the header will ride up the page, leaving a lot of whitespace below it. Secondly, in Safari the header appears very dark and doesn’t blend into the background.
I had heard that someone found a place in page.php where there was a missing closing div tag. Could this be part of the problem, or was it fixed? I’m examining your 0.41 version of Subtle.

Safari darker-footer fix:

The footer for 0.41 Subtle (default) is always rendered darker than it appears in other browsers.

Here is why: it seems the image used for the footer (the bottom center one, not the repeating one) was saved with some extra image information (possible from photoshop). Safari, being sophisticated, is reading this extra information which most other browsers do not.

The solution: …is for the developer (and/or the user) to resave the footer.jpg image (in Photoshop: View->Proof Setup > Monitor RGB, then Save for Web). This will save the proper meta information within the .jpg file so that Safari renders it consistent with other browsers.

Enjoy!
~Raj

Just a little CSS fix: if I use a “pre” text block with long lines, them go out the margins. Add a style like “overflow: auto” to make the scroll bars to appear.

After upgrading to WP 2.5 the links for my subpages have been replaced with the following error:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [..]/wp-includes/post.php on line 1783

Any ideas where I should look to fix this? I have Subtle 0.41 currently installed.

@Raj – Would you mind sending me your fixed file for inclusion in the install package?

Regarding DIVs – this version of Subtle – thanks to zetrotinet – should be XHTML certified, though I imagine it’s possible something creep’d it. I’ll take a quick look, since I’m working on the subpages error today too.

@Satollo – I’ll take a look into getting that added for the next release, which should be soon. Thanks for the idea.

Just found the solution to my problem with child pages showing an error message (line 1783 of post.php) here
Hope this helps anyone else experiencing this!

Some of the Gluedieas Themes Comes with Green BG instead of Grey BG…Is there any readymade Gluedideas Templates is available ??

Just a little CSS fix: if I use a “pre” text block with long lines, them go out the margins. Add a style like “overflow: auto” to make the scroll bars to appear.