Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

Regular readers will know that I frequently trawl my backlinks, logs, and referrers to find other Blogmasters who use one of our templates, and now and again I post a short entry about them. Today I've got another couple of sites where the webmaster has customised a template freely available from this site, and made it their own with the addition of their own graphics and styles.

Tesoro High School surprised me when I saw their page, I always thought schools exist on .edu domains, and perhaps be part of a government website, but it seems not in California. Tesoro HS are using Serendipity with our andreas06 port, and have customised the header graphic quite substantially. I did a quick google on the school because their website is so new, and found the school itself is also new being only a few years old. Despite this they are knocking up some impressive stat's, so kudos to them. Having said that, if they use Serendipity, you'd expect nothing less.

Our next site, The Meadows, is a quircky sort of site owned by a man who raises turtles, takes photgraphs and talks about his personal life and work. Interesting site to read, but what really grabbed our attention was the changes he's made to the ceejay01 template we produced. It seems that quite a few Serendipity and Blogger users like this template. We're thinking of making the .psd available for the header graphic since so many users seem to like the borders and styles, but want to customise their header image.

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!

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.

Its been a few days now since I started working on Hemingway, and the result is that I estimate I'm probably about 30% to completion. At this rate, I may be able to release the template sometime in the next 1-2 weeks. I've posted a couple of screenshots so you can see how parts of the site are coming together. The startpage is more or less complete, so is the detail page, and also the main overview pages. The sidebar items haven't been styled yet.

I added the white colorset yesterday, and it looks stunning, as you can see from these screenshots. I suspect that white will be the most popular colorset for Serendipity users.

You'll notice from the startpage screenshot that the latest entry is always displayed along with the list of recent entries. This is diffferent from the original WP version because I think it affects the usability of the template.

The single entry screenshot shows how different this template is from any other Serendipity theme. The entry footer is moved over to the left of the entry, and is rewritten to remove parts that aren't really needed, such as comments and trackbacks. The smarty code has been rewritten for comments and trackbacks, and the comment form is the same as the WP version. I hate the tables based version of the comment from, and this template adopts the exact same code as the WP version. Some of my other template also use a css only comment form based on a definition list, but Hemingway breaks from that and uses the regular form controls of input and label.

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.

Wow, this is particularly exciting for me, I get the SitePro News email alert almost every day filled with great SEO stuff, and 'holy carp', thanks to Jude for the phrase, they've setup a blog, using Serendipity, and best of all using a template I designed. Wow, can I say that again, Wow!

Ok, to the people at SitePro News, thanks for the vote of confidence in our project, it means a lot to the Serendipity developers and me in particular to see our project being used by high profile people like yourselves. I suspect the template will probably change at some point to match your site design, and if you need any help, please contact me, I'd be pretty delighted to help out.