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I've finally ported my Soccer 2006 template from the original Serendipity theme to Blogger. Every Blogger template we're released has taught us more about blogspot and its quirks and we hope this template will be well received. The layout is a standard two column css only design, but we added a little football to the post title and sidebar titles, and tiled a patch of grass for the sidebar. The photograph is courtesy of Adam Klepsteen who has been very supportive of the template.

Get the template.

After a request from Garvin Hicking, the lead developer of Serendipity, for a port of the hugely successful Wordpress theme Hemingway to Serendipity, I thought I'd take up the challenge, in between updating this site and continuing to work on other templates - which reminds me, I need to do more on the updated default theme, ah well not enough hours - anyway, enough rambling. The screenshot shows the first very rough draft of the startpage of Hemingway for Serendipity.

This is an interesting template to work on. First, the startpage only displays the latest two entries, and they are truncated. I've been forced to create a new smarty template file for these that removes all the other bits and pieces that you would normally expect from a Serendipity entry, specifically all the plugin code, comments, comment form etc. Those bits might be added back in later.

The next challenge was the sidebars. Hemingway actually uses three columns for sidebars, fortunately Garvin is really wanting to push development of Serendipity and the latest alpha of Serendipity 1.1 includes a new template configuration option that allows the template designer to add more sidebar spots around the screen instead of the previous two.

This is actually an amazingly powerful tool and will mean less troubleshooting in the future. Let me tell you why. At present, any template that doesn't support the traditional left and right sidebars, for example if the template is two column and only one sidebar, is confusing to many new users of Serendipity. What happens is they happily go into their plugin management screen and drag plugins into the left or right sidebar, then expect these to showup in the template, but they don't.

And the reason they don't is because the template only has one column for sidebar plugins, then the user makes a complaint in the forums, and the whole things gets really confusing to explain. The new template option that Garvin has coded will allow the template designer to remove a sidebar column from the options list if it isn't needed, meaning that the user will never even get the option of placing a plugin into a column that doesn't exist - Beautiful, an elegant solution, and a MAJOR step forward for Serendipity theme design.

Before the Soccer World Cup in Germany I produced a soccer theme featuring the flags of every competing nation. It is now time to release the update to that template allowing it to be used for any soccer enthusiast or club.

The flags have been removed and a navbar put in their place. The navbar links will need to be edited, users of Serendipity 1.0 need to edit index.tpl while users of Serendipity 1.1 simply need to make their changes when they install the template through the 'Manage Styles' secion of the admin suite.

Anyway, feel free to download and use this template. It's been released under a GPL license.

Someone emailed me asking how to widgetize a Serendipity template. For those who don't know, widgets is the name Wordpress people use for their plugin that allows users to sort their sidebar plugins or even remove them altogether.

The Serendipity developers actually included this functionality so long ago we've probably even forgotten who orignially came up with the concept. Wordpress just copied us. And only recently as well. Now I know my loyal WP readers and friends in that community are going to flame me, but I don't care, bring it on. Ok that's not true, I do care, but bring it on anyway.

So, if you're a Serendipity user and you want to edit your templates to add that widget stuff, you don't need to, every template for Serendipity already has it built-in. Need proof, easy, just open index.tpl in one of the templates. What you're looking for is a couple of lines that look like this;

{serendipity_printSidebar side="right"}
{serendipity_printSidebar side="left"}
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