Carl discovers the world

Robert Lender has published a short tutorial on adding an extra navbar link in the smallbiz01 template for users of Serendipity 1.1

For my English visitors, the gist of the tutorial is fairly simple to follow and involves editing the config.inc.php and index.tpl files from the template folder.

In config.inc.php add the following code, making sure to start adding additional links from number 6 since 5 is already used for one of the footer links.

array(
'var' => 'navlink6text',
'title' => 'Navlink #6 Text',
'description' => 'Enter the sixth navigation text',
'type' => 'string',
'default' => 'Downloads',
),
array(
'var' => 'navlink6url',
'title' => 'Navlink #6 URL',
'description' => 'Enter the sixth navigation URL eg \'http://www.somesite.url\'',
'type' => 'string',
'default' => '#',
),

Then, open index.tpl and add the following line after the existing list items within the second part of the navbar (these are the bits that have the smarty code which includes a reference to the $template_option's

<li><a href="{$template_option.navlink6url}" title="{$template_option.navlink6text}">
{$template_option.navlink6text}</a></li>

Robert's tutorial mentions that adding as many extra links as you need is possible by simply repeating the process described above, and incrementing the numbers in the variables navlink6text and navlink6url. Easily done and this will extend your template navbar to include as many links as you require.

Thanks to Robert for sharing his experiences.

This short tutorial is about changing the text used in sidebar titles with images so that unusual fonts or artistic headers become possible. This is a really cool effect, and if you're a fan of the css Zen Garden you'll know that websites can be works of art.

The designers of Serendipity really did think of all possibilities when they gave every sidebar block its own unique style name.

Replacing the sidebar title with an image is relatively easy, start by creating your image and give it a width and height that compliment your sidebar. Read More

Have you ever thought it would be great if you could make the latest entry in your Serendipity blog stand out, perhaps use a different color, or even add some imagery to let your visitors know this entry is special?

Using some Smarty code and css we can, imagine how much more usable your blog would be. Even more so if your blog is part of a network. If you run competitions, review new products, or perhaps comment on breaking news, your site visitors will appreciate seeing at a glance which entry is most important.

So what could your latest entry or sticky post look like? Well, CSS allows us to do so much, you could literally change every single style. In my experiments I changed the background color around the entry title, in another I added a background image which reads 'Breaking News', but you could go so far as to give your entry different font settings, adjust your margins and padding, perhaps even remove the entry footer so your latest entry looks like an html box.

So how do you go about making your latest entry stand out? The key is to understand that all entries on overview pages are given a unique id starting at 0 which is the top (first) entry. Once we understand this, we also need to make sure Serendipity only changes our first entry if it also appears on the startpage otherwise the top entry of every page will adopt our new styles. Read More

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 although being a realist I know this isn't going to happen overnight.

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