Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

Congratulations to Garvin and the development team of Serendipity. Version 1.1 was released today, and promises to become the standard for all users very quickly, especially given the volume of v1.1 templates and plugins that are being produced. I'll be updating to this latest release over the next few days and I heartily encourage all Serendipity users to do that same.

To celebrate the release of v1.1, myself and Matthew Groeninger have created a new v1.1 only template, which we believe showcases all of the best features of v1.1. "Weather" incorporates multiple sidebar columns, makes extensive use of Smarty to display a variety of different views for the startpage, overview pages, archive pages, detail pages and plugin pages.

But wait, check out the weather...
But most interesting of all is the integrated weather for your city! Yes, you read that correctly, within the admin screen you can select your nearest metar site and coordinates for your city and this template will let your site visitors see the current weather for your location and even day, night, sunrise or sunset for your city. In our opinion this is one of the most exciting modifications to a Serendipity template that could be imagined. Hmmm, maybe that's a lie, Matthew is a very imaginative guy.

Ok, so you want to download this template and try it out for yourselves. A couple of points to note, this is a big template, the zipfile is over 750kb, please only download it if you really want it. Over the next few days we're sure it will end up in Spartacus, we just need to make sure that everyone is happy with it. Ooh, before I forget, there are two versions of index.tpl included with this template, and some users may need to switch to the other version. One of the versions (index.tpl) uses apostrophes within the smarty code (at the if statement that evaluates the day/night function) and this seems to work well in some installations, but another version is also included (index_alternate.tpl) which does not use apostrophes, and is the version Matthew himself is using. At least I think its that way round, it might be the other way round, but you'll figure it out if you end up with night instead of day.

I'm really sorry that I've had to include two versions of index.tpl, and I'm sure this will be fixed in time for this template to be added to Spartacus. Also, either myself or Matthew will most likely be adding the weather module code into a vanilla template for other users to customise.

I recently updated the andreas08 theme for Serendipity, originally designed by one of my favorite open source web designers, Andreas Viklund. In addition to the configurable navigation buttons and colorsets, the template now also supports swappable columns, so that the sidebar can be positioned to the left or right of the content. I've been asked to produce a three column version of this template, and will probably add this in the next release. All of my Serendipity templates can be downloaded from my Serendipity templates page.

With the recent release of both IE7, Firefox 2.0, and the incredibly impressive Opera 9.02, I've decided to upgrade to the latest versions of these and then make sure that all of my templates work as they are intended to in these browsers. A while back we had some issues with a couple of templates not working in IE (the css only version of the Serendipity default template, and my small business template) so I'm really over the whole concept of cross browser compatibility. IE6 has always been a significant problem for me, for some reason it seems to render pages differently on different computers, even though they all run Windows XP. So far I haven't experienced this problem in IE7, so I've decided to make an executive decision regarding IE6, I'm going to ditch it, and will no longer support it in my templates. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be testing all of my previously released templates and making sure they work in IE7.

I've still got a couple of templates waiting to be released, and my plan is to do this over the next couple of weeks, then I'm going to take a break from template design for a while to learn video editing, and dvd authoring. Quite a few of our friends are not tech savvy and my plan is to create a series of short tutorials for them, and make these available from this site.

After a few weeks of development, its finally ready to be tested by the world at large. Hemingway is bleeding edge at the moment, and will only work as it is intended to on Serendipity v1.1 beta4 (or one of the latest nightly snapshots) so be warned!

It's possible that many small issues need to be dealt with well, actually a few less thanks to loyal Serendipity users, and this template won't be fully complete until the Serendipity developers have finished developing their multi-column sidebar plugin selector. So expect minor updates to Hemingway over the next few weeks whilst this is all wrapped up. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Matthias, Costa and Ivan for the German, Polish, and Bulgarian language translations. I would dearly love to ship the final version of Hemingway with other Serendipity supported languages, so please read my original request if you're interested in being credited with this.

EDIT: Thanks to a request from Sebastian, I've incorporated an extra sidebar, which will only ever appear in the detail page and allows the entry's links plugin or any plugin for that matter to be displayed on the entry detail page under footer info in the left-hand column. Hope you like it Sebastian. Also thanks to Yellowled and Costa, I've changed the way the authors plugin and entry links plugins are displayed. The list links will take more effort, it seems the location of the css may be hardcoded into the plugin, but I'll report back once I've done some more work on it.

The zipfile has been upated, so download Hemingway

I was very pleasantly surprised to see an announcement in the Serendipity forums that Costa has designed a new template for his blog, incorporating an idea he had emailed me about, which was to place the comments and comment form to the right of the blog entry. Take a look at the screenshot to see what I'm talking about.

Costa is justifiably proud of his efforts, and I think that his concept sets the stage for some new and innovative designs for the Serendipity world. Well done Costa!

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.

Over the next few days we'll be updating most of our Serendipity zipfiles. The goal is to make every single Serendipity template produced by us fully compatible with versions 0.91, 1.0, and 1.1 of Serendipity.

We are also implementing version numbers for all templates. Since our goal is to make all templates compatible with v1.1 of Serendipity, and to avoid confusion between our version numbers and s9y version numbers, we plan to start all updated template version numbers at 1.1 as well. This means that within the 'Manage Styles' tab in your Serendipity admin suite our templates will be named like this, ceejay01 v1.1.

Any further updates to our templates will be given an alphanumeric code following this, such as ceejay01 v1.1 upd1 indicating that the template is currrently in its first update. We hope this won't be confusing to users, and that it will give us, and the Serendipity development team, the ability to troubleshoot any issues that users have by comparing their version number against the current version.

In addition, we'll be removing all links to Serendipity zipfiles from within the entries on this blog, and instead referring all download requests to our new Serendipity Templates page. This means that over the next few days our rss feed might show a lot of older entries, we apologise for this but believe our site will be more usable once the process is complete.

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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