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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

In a previous post I discussed my feeling that the next/prev links which appear at the base of the overview pages, I call them the page footer, were flawed, and I suggested a fix for this. I believe this creates a more visually appealing link than the original serendipity default.

The page footer is comprised of three elements, the previous link, the footer info, and the next link. This article suggests a usability enhancement so that where either the next or previous link is missing, for example on the startpage, that instead of the link being left out, the link text will remain in position but greyed out and not clickable.

I have two reasons for suggesting this improvement. First, users become accustomed to seeing these links and the greyed out link text is a friendlier method of alerting them that they have reached the end or beginning of the overview pages. Secondly, I like the symmetry of seeing the page footer maintain its position and size across all overview pages. Read More

Welcome back. I hope you've had a play with the dusk theme and you're now familiar with its layout and how we got the structure of the theme to work under serendipity. If you've just joined this series, be sure to read part one

I had hoped to do some customisation of the dusk theme to start making it look like a serendipity theme, but when I started writing my explanation of the html and smarty code in the serendipity index.tpl file I realised this wasn't going to be possible. I am mindful of the requests I've received on the serendipity forums to create an explanation of theming, and this article seemed to be a perfect opportunity to add some background explanation. Part three will now focus exclusively on the entries, part four on the comments, part five on the sidebar, and part six on additional considerations. At that point we will have a complete theme ready to use. Read More

This article is all about porting a Wordpress theme over to Serendipity blog. The theme we're going to be porting is dusk, available from beccary.com. This theme is an attractive moody theme particulalry liked for its purple and black background. The only description I could think of to describe this theme is 'gothic lace'. The inspiration for this article, which will become a short series on porting and then customising a Wordpress theme, came from discussions over at the serendipity forums.

After downloading the dusk zipfile, unzip it to your serendipity templates folder. Next, we need serendipity to recognise the new theme, so copy the 'info.txt' file from any other theme into your new dusk folder. Open this file and edit the details so that the theme name is now dusk. You can safely leave the other fields the same and serendipity will happily use your new theme, but if you plan to share your theme then go ahead and change the author name and creation date as well. Read More