Thistle

Thistle. A feminine, simple, lavender & purple theme.

Thistle

Thistle is my very first true WordPress theme. Potassium was only a design/style for the Sandbox theme, so there.

Since I’m still relatively new to WordPress themes, Thistle may not be a perfect theme but if you see any problems with the theme (browser inconsistencies, invalid code, etc), feel free to let me know and I’ll correct it in later releases.

The secondary color of the blog title is applied by hardcoding the title into header.php, with <span> tags surrounding the text you want with the secondary color. Here’s mine for example:

<h1 id="blog-title"><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>" rel="home">Bolt<span>Press</span></a></h1>

Commented out in the sidebar, just above the PHP code to generate dynamic widgets, is an About static widget (i.e. it isn’t controlled by the widget plugin nor WordPress). You may remove the comments to fill in something about yourself or your blog. Here’s mine (without the first long paragraph) for example:

<li id="about-me">
    <h2 class="widgettitle"><?php _e('About'); ?></h2>
    <p>BoltPress is my tech blog as well as the official blog.<a href="http://NOVALISTIC.com">NOVALISTIC</a>.</p>
    <p><a href="/about">Find out more about me and my blog.</a></p>
</li>

Features

Valid XHTML & CSS!
Two columns - sidebar to the right
Fixed layout - from 1024 by 768 onward
Widget-ready
Aside-ready
All icons designed just for this
Has a favicon
Secondary color for blog title, see above for more
Optional About static sidebar widget, see above for more

Download Thistle

The current release is version 1.0.1.

Thistle 1.0.1 (.zip) - MD5 1a1a5e50152e1df4a306016a8ddfda8c
Thistle 1.0.1 (.tar.gz) - MD5 9bff91c66d82a3e298db7dfcefab7b5c

To install this theme, extract the single folder /thistle into your themes folder, i.e. /path/to/wp-content/themes. Head to Admin Panel > Design and Thistle’s screenshot should appear in your list of themes. Click on the screenshot to activate it, and have fun!

Known Issues

Navigation at the top right does not display at all in Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 can’t decide whether to show it or not; repeated refreshes may be necessary to get it to appear in IE7. Fixed in Thistle 1.0.1 - please upgrade.

Changelog

Thistle 1.0.1

Fixes IE’s problem with the tabbed navigation - mad props to Justin Tadlock!
If an author doesn’t have a web site, Thistle won’t convert the author’s name to a link in the author display page.
Moved the designed-by information to the Meta widget as it seems to be a somewhat more suitable place than the footer.
Extraneous template markup removed from a few areas.
Some other very tiny fixes here and there.
Updated for WordPress 2.5 (with backwards compatibility still in place):
- If the blog is running WP 2.5, use is_front_page(), otherwise fall back to is_home()
- If the blog is running WP 2.5, use get_avatar() for Gravatars, otherwise fall back to gravatar() if a Gravatar plugin is installed.

Thistle 1.0.0

Initial release.

Older versions

Thistle 1.0.0 (.zip) - c7fd697b79da1313d98a51fbd3ecb4e2
Thistle 1.0.0 (.tar.gz) - d34ab40d3a43d09c6f8b5d8171fe99f6

#header { float: left; width: 850px; height: 150px; font-family: Constantia, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; background: #fff url('images/bg_header.gif') left top repeat-x; border-top: 5px solid #5a3d95; } #blog-title, #blog-desc { width: 400px; height: 150px; overflow: hidden; } #blog-desc span { position: absolute; right: 0; bottom: 25px; } ul#nav { float: right; list-style: none; text-align: right; }

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More updates...

Hey BoltClock. While I’m not big on the color purple, I think the theme looks clean. Plus, you’ve got valid XHTML. It’s much better than my first WordPress theme. I’ve played around with the code a bit and think I’ve come up with a solution for your IE6 and 7 problem. The first thing I done was put the “#nav” menu inside of the “#head” div, but above the “h1.” Then, I changed a bit of the CSS (I’m not sure exactly what all I changed, so you might have to pick it apart a bit):
```
#header {
	float: left;
	width: 850px;
	height: 150px;
	font-family: Constantia, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;
	background: #fff url('images/bg_header.gif') left top repeat-x;
	border-top: 5px solid #5a3d95;
}
#blog-title, #blog-desc {
	width: 400px;
	height: 150px;
	overflow: hidden;
}
#blog-desc span {
	position: absolute;
	right: 0;
	bottom: 25px;
}
ul#nav {
	float: right;
	list-style: none;
	text-align: right;
}
```
There was also a bottom scrollbar that was showing in at least IE7 and the blog description was moving into the sidebar that should be fixed. I know all designers do things differently, but I always try to use “float” instead of “position” or “absolute” if I can. I hope this helps.

Great job on your first theme!
Justin Tadlock

on December 20, 2007 at 11:38 pm.

Hey Justin, I tried that code (whose markup I edited to <pre> just to make it a little clearer) and it seemed to fix things for at least IE7. I’m not sure about IE6 because I’ve never managed to get standalone IEs to work on my PC. Meh. Nevertheless, the change will be included in the next Thistle release.

About the deal between the blog description and the sidebar, I can’t seem to reproduce the problem. Is it caused by a really long description or something else that I didn’t notice?

Well, thanks for that, Justin

BoltClock

on December 21, 2007 at 1:08 pm.

I’m glad I could help out at least a little. I use this Multiple IE Installer to test versions of IE on my computer. As far as I know, it works fine. Before I came to Korea, I had different computers I could test on, so it’s the best I got right now.

I’m not sure about the blog description thing. Yours looks fine in the demo, but it didn’t on my downloaded copy though. The description is shorter than yours. It may have been a result of me messing around with the code a little because I didn’t notice it at first.

Justin Tadlock

on December 21, 2007 at 11:28 pm.

I just came back to check that link, and that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to use on my PC… to no avail. It used to work well until I installed IE7.

BoltClock

on December 26, 2007 at 3:00 pm.