Subtle for WordPress » Christopher Frazier

What Ever Happened to DPBlogs?

Christopher Frazier — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:38:45 +0000

If you’ve been watching the Glued Ideas site for a while, you’ll remember that as part of our content recommendation project we started a blog network called “Digital Photography Blogs.” We brought together some fantastic amateur and professional photographers and asked them to just write - write what they know and what they’re interested in. They did this for two years, creating some fantastic content over that time.

The problem with the site was that each blogger had their own subdomain and none of the content from other authors was accessible from any given blog. Good thinking on our part, there. Anyhow, a few months ago we were trying to decide what to do with the site and after some discussion John and I decided to try relaunching with a new look and feel with the same authors… all in the same blog. The net result is pretty cool.

If you’re interested at all in photography, I’d suggest taking a second and visiting our site, Digital Photography Blogs, and saying hi. Our writers would love your feedback and encouragement, and you just might learn something. See you there!

Subtle 0.42 for WordPress 2.5

Christopher Frazier — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:24:54 +0000

The WordPress folks changed the way get_page_children works, breaking quite a few themes that used the function. This affected sites that use the “Show sub-pages when viewing a page” option. The Return True site posted a fix that seems to work fine, though I’d love to hear from people if there are any problems. Also included in this release is the fixed footer.jpg for the “default” theme from Raj and a check to see if “the_tags()” exists before calling the function (needed for older WP installs). Feel free to post issues and concerns here.

Download the latest version of Subtle for WordPress

WordPress 2.5

Christopher Frazier — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:44:14 +0000

Nina’s comment that WordPress 2.5 worked was enough for me to throw caution to the wind and just install it on the GI site without testing. Bad form, I know, but sometimes you just want to see what all of the fuss is about. Well, Subtle and WP 2.5 seem to work just fine.

Now that the testing is done, I’m having fun playing with this new beast. WP 2.5 is just so different that it’s going to take a little while to work out how I feel about it. The Web-2.0-ish look and feel are fine, however I’m beginning to feel done with the pale colors and 1px-gray-outlines-around-everything that this look entails.

I do like the fact that so much of the UI has been redesigned to be more obvious. Having trained quite a few clients in how to use WP, the UI changes are all welcome. Also, having related tasks available on the Edit / Write Post page is really smart. That’s usability!

The Add Media options are fantastic. I have a couple of clients doing video and audio podcasts and the addition of these links will be a welcome change from the current method of copying and pasting HTML I’ve given them. I’m having trouble with WP finding my old uploaded media, but I imagine that’s just an artifact of upgrading too many times and links getting lost.

I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about this new release. What do you love? What do you hate? Does this release get you interested in blogging again?

Subtle 0.41 - Tags and Fixes

Christopher Frazier — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:33:19 +0000

With a lot of help from Nina over at Lazy Geisha, Subtle 0.41 comes to you with a bunch of bug fixes and added support for tags. Personally, the tag / category distinction is a little funny, but I understand why they added it. That said, marking themes that don’t support tags as incompatible with WP 2.3 seems a little draconian. Whatever. I’m making up with my WP overlords, so no more complaining.

Here’s what’s different:

Single posts now display tags
A number of bugs in the linking to author pages have been fixed
Fixed a bug in the TITLE of the page that added an extra dash

A quick note: if you change the name of the theme folder (usually “gluedideas_subtle”) make sure that you don’t add any spaces. If you add a space your header will not display correctly in Firefox. I’m looking into some error checking for this for the next release.

As always, feel free to post your comments and bugs here on the blog.

The Loop, Asides and Widgets

Christopher Frazier — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:38:39 +0000

When widgets were first introduced, the API documentation suggested a number of cool widget ideas including a widget for “asides” - basically those separate streams of posts that don’t fit into the main blog stream and need their own space in the sidebar. Asides were the rage two years ago, but it seems like most blogs are moving away from them and using Twitter or something like that instead.

My point in mentioning asides is that they’re basically the WordPress Loop (the code in a theme that displays a list of posts) made into a widget. Since I’ve been working on building themes again (see Real Fusion), I’ve been thinking a lot about modularity of theme components and ways to make managing content on a site easier for the site owner and this of course lead me to think about The Loop and widgets, which then lead me to wonder how hard it would be to build an entire theme using widgets. Is it possible? Would it be useful? I’ve played with some test code and it’s definitely possible. I took my modularized Loop code from the Real Fusion site and started playing with options to make it work as a widget. It looks like it works great.

The real question is, “Why would anyone want to do this?” In the end, people use WordPress because it’s simple and not a full-blown CMS like Drupal that requires managing every block of content on the site. Themes are super simple ways to add some style to your site while not having to sweat the details of site design. Would anyone actually be interested in being able to create new loops, stack them on a page in any order or structure using the drag-and-drop widget admin, change them without having to mess with code (ex. list a single category of posts, and then change the category on the fly), etc.? I don’t know. What do you think?

Our Friends: Real Fusion

Christopher Frazier — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:12:54 +0000

In addition to pastoring and being a dad, I also build websites for people. Some of those sites include DiMichi International and Digital Photography Blogs and now I can add a new site to the list: Real Fusion. It’s a week-daily video podcast focusing on spirituality and life. The guys are cool and the shorts are usually funny. I built the template and did some identity work, so check out the site and let us know what you think.

Subtle 0.4 - Working with Widgets

Christopher Frazier — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:06:22 +0000

So here’s how the conversation more or less went down with John…

John: Dude, the site has a PR7! What the heck?
Chris: Really? No way. Wow… it does. Too bad it got hacked. I had to pull the thing down.
John: You’ve GOT to get something up there.
Chris: Ya… you’re probably right.

So a couple of weeks later - and more prodding from John - not only is the site up again, but I’m releasing Subtle for WordPress 0.4 which now works with WordPress 2.3+. That’s right, I’ve finally caved and rewritten the widget code to conform to the wonky but ubiquitous widgets platform, which ended up making relaunching the site way easier. Go figure.

In addition to the widgets update, I’ve also cleaned up the archives / search results headers so that they let you know what you’re looking at when browsing through categories or date-based archives. Obvious? Yep. Should have put that in there years ago.

So if you’re still using Subtle for WordPress or are interested in trying it out again, now’s the time to grab a copy and start playing with it. Remember, Subtle has some cool features like Theme Styles and author pages - all features you won’t see in any other themes for WordPress right now. If you find bugs, feel free to e-mail me or post comments on the blog.

EDIT (08/02/20 9:23AM): I’ve updated the footer chicklet that links to Glued Ideas Blog to link directly to the page here. Additionally, I’ve added the Glued theme style to base install and made it the default theme style. Default and Subvert are still part of the package, but they were feeling a little dated. Then again, so is Glued. Maybe it’s time for a new theme.

Glued Theme Available

Christopher Frazier — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:08:11 +0000

So it only took months for me to remove five lines of code to make the theme style generic, but I finally am making available the Glued theme style for anyone interested in having a site that looks pretty much exactly like this one. The theme style doesn’t support header image import or anything special, but it does have those fun tabs.

I haven’t spent a lot of time testing this to make sure it works across all browsers, but I think it should be fine. Feel free to post issues you have in the forums and I’ll try to check in to get fixes into the tracker.

Glued Theme Style

Wordpress 2.2 Widgets: K2 to the Rescue!

Christopher Frazier — Fri, 18 May 2007 17:33:24 +0000

Blogan, on the K2 forums, has posted a great plugin that disables Wordpress 2.2’s built-in widget support so that you can use your favorite widget plugin, such as Sidebar Modules. This is a great temporary solution to the current issue with Subtle not showing widgets correctly on WP 2.2 and is even better for those of us who don’t like to use Automattic’s widget interface.

Download the plugin now!

Subtle and Wordpress 2.2

Christopher Frazier — Thu, 17 May 2007 15:20:14 +0000

I haven’t had a chance to install 2.2 yet, but I’m hearing from a few people that the widget API changed so much in the latest version of Wordpress that a number of themes have broken widget support - including Subtle. I’ll be looking into the problem over the next few days. For the time being, I’d suggest sticking with a pre-2.2 installation if you’re planning to continue using Subtle.