Carl discovers the world

It's been a long time coming, my first publicly available Wordpress theme, based on the other half's pixabella04 free html template. I've had a few comments here, and in my stats showing the people are actually looking for Wordpress versions of my themes, so bowing to pressure, here is the first.

This is a widgetised three column wordpress theme with a separate options page allowing blog owners to choose either green, blue or red colorsets. To install, simply download the zipfile, extract, and copy the folder into your Wordpress themes folder, then in your administration dashboard select a new theme. Once you've chosen pixabella04 you'll see that the theme has support for adding or changing widgets in three places. The first is the top part of the sidebar where the advertising currently sits, then both left and right sidebars.

In addition, an options pages is created with a dropdown select box that allows blog owners to choose green, blue or red colorsets. The navbar in pixabella04 is set to display your static pages. Hopefully this won't cause any problems for anyone. The navbar works but has no limits on the number of pages so blog owners with a large number of pages might have to play around with header.php to make this display correctly.

The theme has been tested in Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 and seems to work find in them all. Special thanks to Brand Spanking New for the icons used in the post footer.

Now, here is the wp-wordpress theme.

This has been a long time in the making but finally it's here, a content first CSS only three column design based on ceejay's Pixabella05.

This first version of the template only includes the regular content-sidebar-sidebar layout, and doesn't yet include the extra blue colorset. Both of these features are still being developed for the Serendipity version which I hope to have completed in the next few weeks so be sure to bookmark this page or subscribe to my feed for updates.

So, why am I releasing an incomplete template, well, it isn't incomplete, it will work well for anyone looking for the included layout and colorset but I'm frantically busy developing designs for Blogger and Ning in addition to some client work and the Hawaii template is just sitting there taunting me so it's better to release it and let people start using it than have it languish on my harddrive. Get the zipfile and let me know what you think of this design, and please report any errors you find.

With the recent update of the original free HTML template that Hawaii is based on I thought I'd add the extra colorsets to my Blogger Template list.

Two versions of this template have been produced, the original content-sidebar-sidebar layout, and the sidebar-content-sidebar layout that a few Bloggers seem to prefer. The images have been uploaded to ImageShack so most Bloggers will only need to download the template files, but if you do need to host the images yourself, the zipfile for Hawaii has been updated to include all four versions of this great template and all the images.

As an interesting aside, the Elvis Presley film Blue Hawaii from 1961 which also stars Joan Blackman is one of my all time favorite films. I know it's a bit old now but it's good fun with a great soundtrack.

I love background images on navbars, they make an everyday ordinary navbar look quite special, just look at my orange navbar. Pixabella put together a few extra navbar images for the Hawaii template so that users could change the colors and overall look of this wonderful Blogger theme.

If you'd like to use one of these new images in your Blogger theme simply upload the new image to a service such as ImageShack or your Blogger account in a draft blog entry, then change the URL of the navbar image in your template CSS. You'll find three separate lines that need to be changed within the Navigation section. Look for #navigation, #navigation #navbar_link a:hover, and .first a