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I've been experimenting with the new theme configurator for Serendipity. I'm hoping most users will upgrade to version 1.1 of Serendipity once it reaches a stable state but this is probably not likely.

This means we may end up with a selection of new templates that are compatible with the theme configurator but cause issues for users with older versions of Serendipity.

The solution is to make Serendipity perform a simple check to see if the user has a compatible version of Serendipity installed, and then provide alternative code if they don't. Read More

If you haven't already noticed, Serendipity version 1.1 alpha4 now includes a new theme configurator allowing theme designers to add colorsets and other configurable options directly into their themes, and allowing users of the themes to select these options from within the admin suite.

Now if you're wondering why I mention this development let me explain. Up till now any time a user wanted to change the colorset of a theme, lets say from blue to pink, the designer had to create two separate themes for the user to download and install, and the user then had to open the Smarty template files to change colorset or edit navbar menus etc. Read More

When I look at other blogging engines and CMS's I often marvel at the design of their header, and the sites that impress me the most are those that make full use of their header to either give the visitor useful information or allow them to interact more with the site.

As I learn more about usability of webpages I'm realising that the sidebars are the wrong place for some of the plugins we see in Serendipity themes. I particularly dislike seeing the site search form in the sidebar, and I know this is my own preference that probably isn't shared by everyone, but for those designers who think like me, here's a quick easy way of placing a search form with submit button into your header, and also making sure that the quicksearch form won't display in the sidebar. Read More

Have you ever wanted a breadcrumb trail on your blog? Most themes for Serendipity don't include a breadcrumb, my conversion of andreas06 includes one, and you could easily add one to any theme.

Giving your users an extra cue to help them navigate around your blog enhances usability, could help with your SEO initiatives, and definitely looks very groovy. The following Smarty code is ready to be copied and pasted directly into your Serendipity blog theme, and could be placed above your site header, just above your content, or even in the footer of your page. Read More

Thank you for joining me again. In part three we worked on the entries, specifically the entry date and title, the meta underneath the title and the entry footer. The dusk theme is so well designed that we are now able to tackle comments, and in this article we are going to work on two separate elements. First we're going to work on the comment title, and then we're going to structure the way we display comments. I promised in part three this would be exciting, so lets get straight into it. Download dusk-part4.zip.

As users of Serendipity we are spoiled by the volume of information available on our blogs, for example we have trackbacks and multiple users by default, whereas other blogs such as WordPress don't. This puts extra demands on theme designers to find ways of presenting this information without cluttering up the screen. The dusk theme has given me the idea of making the entry footer different on detail pages from the overview page. What I'm going to do is remove the comment and trackback links from the detail page entry footer. So that the information is still available to the blog visitor, I'm going to put this information into the trackbacks and comments title instead. The image to the left shows what this will look like. Read More