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Yesterday, with the invaluable help of Jonathan of Digital Toast, I changed this blog’s WordPress theme. I’ve been considering doing this for some time for many reasons. After reviewing hundreds of WP themes I found Living OS Upsilon, which I think is quite wonderful because one of its main features incorporates a WP Smoothgallery slideshow plugin and allows you to display rotating images in the blog banner.
For some time, I’ve wanted to redesign my banner to feature a specifically Jewish theme. Upsilon allows me to load a series of images and highlight what I find special or unique in Jewish art, culture, or politics in image form.
The only downside is that as far as I can tell you pretty much have to figure out the theme and how it works on your own. While the plugin author has created a wonderful tool, his willingness to interact with users is quite limited in my experience. I’m not sure why that is though there may be many legitimate reasons. It does make for some frustration though if you’re not up to the task technically. Which is why Jonathan has proven himself indispensable in sorting through some of the technical challenges.
For anyone thinking of switching to Upsilon or one of its related themes a few hints. The Recent Events portion of the main page banner is controlled through the Sidebar2 in the widget section. Also, the WP Footnote plugin conflicts with the Slideshow feature (thanks for figuring that out, Jonathan!). Anyone who’s using the former will have to disable it until/unless the author can resolve the issue.
If anyone reading this has css experience, I’d like to widen the post display area and narrow some of the side borders. I’d love some help changing those dimensions.
Several readers have told me they’ve found it difficult to figure out how to post a comment from a post displaying on the main page. To do that, look at the line just under the post title that displays the post date. You will see an small icon with the upper half of a body in profile along with a number (the number of comments for that post). Click on the icon and this will open the comment box. Alternatively, you can also click on the post title & will find the comment box at the bottom of the post.
Please let me know if you have any other comments or issues with the new theme. Let me know if you discover any technical problems as well.
Great job on the new theme – I really like it!
Hi,
if you want to change the width’s find the following bits in style.css in that themes directory. They’re pretty near the top.
These lines control the width of the posts area
div#wrapper{clear:both;
width: 485px;
float:left;
}
This controls main navigation width:
div#navigation{
float:left;
width: 280px;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
This controls the ‘header’ navigation width
div#extra-sidebar{
height:285px;
width:285px;
float:right;
text-align:left;
background: url(images/extrabar.jpg) repeat-x;
}
Now, if you want to increase the posts width by say 40px. Add that to the existing number. So you get 525px instead of 485px and then subtract it from the navigation widths so you get 240px and 245px.
That should do it.
Hello Richard- I have found how to post and proud of myself. Just wanted to tell you that I like your plug-in images. Interesting choices. The print now is so tiny on my screen- but somehow I think it will be okay.