Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

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

One of the things I've always liked about some other blogging platforms has been the way they style their calendars. I particularly like the way they apply a background image to any cell that has a date in it, but apply no background image to cells that are empty. I believe this makes the calendar more usable and more attractive. Sadly the smarty file that defines the html output of our calendar, 'plugin_calendar.tpl', doesn't include any code to determine whether a cell is empty or not empty.

In a previous article I explained how to style the calendar using Serendipity's standard css class names. My Andreas08 theme was the first of my own themes to incorporate these discoveries by highlighting the first column in the table and placing a border around today's date. I started experimenting with background colors in my default theme competition entry when I used the smarty 'cycle' function to add a gradient background to the rows in the calendar. Now we're going to add the extra functionality that allows Serendipity theme designers to style cells that aren't empty. Read More

In part two I said I was going to focus on the entries.tpl in this article. This is one of the least understood template files because most theme designers actually use the default entries layout and spend more time on the index.tpl or style.css files.

Whilst blog entries in Serendipity and Wordpress are similar, the way they are presented can be different. The first main difference is that Serendipity is a multi-user blog by default, which means our themes need to include a 'posted by' link to the author's name.

In addition, Serendipity event plugins often appear in the entry footer, for example the freetag, karma, or multilingual plugins. The dusk theme will require us to change our entries.tpl so that Rebecca's original format is followed. Read More