I hereby declare version oh-won (0.1) of Simpla 2 released. The only change is that it now supports nested comments and other fun comment related stuff from WP 2.7.

Please feel free to rework, criticize and moan loudly. Responses are cherished!

(the theme is still under CC-Attribution Share-Alike license. The good bits are by Phu Ly, and the bad parts and minor WP 2.7 related changes are by yours truly).

Running the clean-build target through ant produced a message I haven’t seen before, though.

C:\Users\tormod.haugen\workspace\PROJECT\build.xml:38: Error starting modern compiler

Luckily Google was just a browser away, and I discovered through pitr’s blog that I needed to update the JVM used by Eclipse to the same as pointed at by JAVA_HOME.

I guess there can be more to it, and I guess you could override JAVA_HOME for that build, but this worked. Thanks.

Or, as Karl Trygve said in a comment; messing about in /usr is usually not a good idea - the link could be made in /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/plugins, and the plugin would then be available for all users on the computer.

Linking the java plugin to Firefox (paths might vary a bit, depending on Java versions):

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/.default/plugins
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

I didn’t have Icedtea installed, but I do use OpenJDK for development. Works now, at least.

It is not the one I’m using here - currently this differs in font size and placement of the sidebar.

Please speak up if you have comments and/or questions.

I haven’t done as much as I wanted to, but I wouldn’t say that much time has been lost to me switching focus. The lack of updates the last week is unfortunate, though, and I should focus on getting blog posts out even if my focused project isn’t going forth. I’ve been spending time on other things than the blog lately, but most of that is on stuff that is more important than a project; friends, family etc.

I’ll drum together a package with the changes I’ve done to Simpla, and make it available. It is CC licensed, so it is alright. I might do more later, but the next blog/theme related project is to hack together a new look, as I have mumbled about earlier. This is not my next project.

I’ll blog my next focus later today, and I’ll also try and keep my updates ticking in a few times a week, at least.

With a bit more research it all looked brighter. It seems as if Linpus is built on Fedora (6?), and then I could at least use the rpm (package) from skype.com. There still was a few troubling hints that I had to download it and install with yam - getting every prerequisite package before I could get it installed.

Reality was even easier than I had guessed, and about as easy as I could hope. I located the terminal and changed the root password, fixing a system menu to the right mouse button, as described by Laptop Magazine. After that I downloaded the rpm package from the net - and it opened by default in the package manager. A few ok’s later, and it had installed all dependencies and skype itself.

I’m still planning on getting easy peasy installed on it later, but I guess I’ll wait until I got time, money and inspiration to get more memory, a SD card and a bigger battery pack for it. Then I probably got a < 1.0 kg computer with almost as much processing power as my aging desktop…

I’ve quickly added the tags as a new line below the post’s category, setting a class to the span for markup, wrapping it in a div for that new line business. The change is to insert the three last lines below into index.php (lines 21 through 23). This fixes both the index page and the single post view, as there’s no specific markup code for single posts, pages or archives. I’ll add some beautifying code for this later, and individual templates for my own theme modification.

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                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="postedby">Posted by <?php the_author() ?></span>
                        <span class="filedto">Filed in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?></span>
                </div>
                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="tagged">Tagged <?php the_tags('', ', ') ?></span>
                </div>

In addition, we need to add some css to style up the tags listing with an icon as the other post info. I chose the page_component.gif image from the same icon series as Simpla uses; the Minis from Famfamfam. Put it in the /images/ folder in your theme’s folder and add the following code to styles.css:

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.tagged{
        background:#fff url(./images/page_component.gif) no-repeat;
        padding:3px;
        padding-left:20px;
}

You can probably see that the style information of the last couple of entries in styles.css are very much alike? Just the file names are different. I get an urge to extract the redundant information as a separate style class, like below, and let each line with an icon get marked with two classes. This makes the file look like this from line 106:

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.icon{  
        padding:3px;
        padding-left:20px;
}
.postedby{
        background:#fff url(./images/user.gif) no-repeat;
}
.filedto{
        background:#fff url(./images/post.gif) no-repeat;
}
.commentslink{
        background:#fff url(./images/packaged.gif) no-repeat;
}
.tagged{
        background:#fff url(./images/page_component.gif) no-repeat;
}

I must now change each line with one of the above class descriptions and add icon. This is easy, as they are collected together in the index.php file. And if nothing else; it saves a tiny bit on bandwidth. Not that it is optimized for it. The programmer in me like to pull out shared information.

From my last change this will now look like this:

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                <div class="entrymeta">
                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="icon postedby">Posted by <?php the_author() ?></span>
                        <span class="icon filedto">Filed in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?></span>
                </div>
                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="icon tagged">Tagged <?php the_tags('', ', ') ?></span>
                </div>
                <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;', 'icon commentslink'); ?>
                </div>

Find all four icon additions? The last is at the end of the comments_popup_link thingey. Great! I also downloaded page_package.gif, page_tick.gif and page_cross.gif for marking of todo lists as I was picking out the tags icon. That is something not directly connected to upgrading Simpla - and perhaps I should find or make a plugin for it. But it’s for another post.

Agree or disagree on method, markup, choice of icon or anything? Speak up, I’d love to hear.

First we’ll make the sidebar accept widgets. The easy, and right, way is to wrap the old sidebar in a condition saying it should be displayed if there is no support for widgets. Do it like this; insert line 2 and 15, making the code look like below:

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<div id="sidebar">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<h2>Pages</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
</ul>
<ul>
<?php get_links_list(); ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

Here we could have made the container around sidebar into an unordered list (ul), but that would mean we’d have to have a look at the css to get things to display correctly. So instead we must do a small fix in functions.php. Instead of using register_sidebars we’ll use register_sidebar (plural vs. singular) with some parameters.

Since the functions.php to register dynamic sidebars in doesn’t exist, we’ll have to create it. Put it in the theme’s folder, and make it contain the following code. Be careful; no space or newlines before or after the lines of code:

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<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
    register_sidebar(array('before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</div>'));
?>

The before and after_widget parameters wraps each widget in a div. This wouldn’t be necessary if the dynamic sidebar call was issued from inside an unordered list (ul), as the default values produces list elements (li).

Now the only task left is to go into the widget page (in the blog administration) and add what you want. I suggest Pages, Categories and Links if you want to keep the feel of Simpla, as it were. Keep tuned for more.

Anything you want to add, ask or tell? Feel free.

Here are the things I did to change the theme as it looks now (2009-01-04T20:59:12+01:00). Increase / change font size and screen real estate. Flip the sidebar to the left. Fix logout from near comment field. I’d love to hear if you like / dislike the changes.

Change font size

First order of business is to increase the text size, because I’ve seen what it helps on some devices. The code changes are from:

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body{   
        background:#fff url(./images/bg.png) repeat-x;
        border-top:5px solid #333;
        color:#555;
        font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
        font-size:62.5%;
        line-height:1.5;
        margin:0;
        padding:0;
        text-align:center;
}

Change relevant line to the following:

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        font-size:12pt;

Then remove lines 30 and 36 from the following block:

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#wrap{  
        margin:0 auto;
        text-align:left;
        width:76em;
}
content{
        font-size:1.2em;
        float:left;
        padding:1em;
        width:40em;
}
#sidebar{
        font-size:1.1em;
        float:right;
        padding-top:2em;
        width:20em;
}

That is, these line should be removed:

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        font-size:1.2em;

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        font-size:1.1em;

These font-size changes means that we have to redistribute a bit of space in the content area. Change line 24, 33 and 39 from above to the following:

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        max-width:80em;

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        width:70%;

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        width:25%;

Flip sidebar to the left hand side

Next step is to flip the sidebar to the left hand side, just because I can. Change line 30 (or 31 if you didn’t change the font-size like above from the first block of code) to the next line:

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#content{
        float:left;
        padding:1em;
        width:70%;
}

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        float:right;

Minor fixes needed for Wordpress 2.7

Logout link in comment.php needed updating because of the new security measures in Wordpress. If this isn’t done, you won’t be able to log out from the link beside the comment field. Find and replace first block of code with the second block of code:

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<p>Logged in as <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-admin/profile.php"><?php echo $user_identity; ?></a>. <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-login.php?action=logout" title="Log out of this account">Logout &raquo;</a></p>

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<p>Logged in as <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-admin/profile.php"><?php echo $user_identity; ?></a>. <a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url(get_permalink()); ?>" title="Log out of this account">Log out &raquo;</a></p>