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

Thistle

Live Preview • Download (latest 1.1.0.2)

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.

Thistle is my last WordPress theme (in fact, only, because it’s also my first theme) to support Internet Explorer 6. It will continue to support IE6 for the rest of its development until the eventual launch of NOVALISTIC…

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
  • Threaded commenting support (new in WordPress 2.7 and Thistle 1.1!)
  • 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 1.1.0.2. Download from WordPress.org (.zip).

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

Changelog

Thistle 1.1.0.2 (December 15, 2008)

  • Double brown-paper-bag release — d’oh!
  • Fixed a big misplacement of a certain XHTML tag in comments.php that breaks the entire theme in the event there are no comments for a post.
  • Removed extraneous padding from sidebar blogrolls.

Thistle 1.1.0.1 (December 13, 2008)

  • Brown-paper-bag release.
  • Stylesheet now caters to WordPress 2.7’s post_class() CSS classes for aside posts.
  • Removed WordPress smiley image borders.
  • Cleared some misbehaving floats.
  • Theme screenshot updated again for Thistle 1.1.0.1.

Thistle 1.1.0 (December 12, 2008)

  • Comments have been rewritten to enable threading, a new feature introduced in WordPress 2.7.
  • Some CSS rounded corners have been added; however, these are only visible by Gecko and WebKit browsers (e.g. Firefox, Camino, Safari, Google Chrome) but Thistle’s CSS remains tentatively valid.
  • Unordered lists are now bulleted with different kinds of leaves instead of discs, circles and squares (unless images are disabled, that is).
  • Fixed the issue whereby the blog title gets nudged down when the tabbed navigation goes beyond half of the layout. Disappearing navigation (only seen in Thistle 1.0.0) does not regress!
  • Various minor bug fixes and style improvements.
  • Theme tags now comply with WordPress.org requirements.
  • Theme screenshot updated for Thistle 1.1.
  • Theme functions no longer contain the nv_ prefix.
  • The theme’s PHP code further complies with WordPress’s coding standards.

Thistle 1.0.2 (July 18, 2008)

Starting from this release, Thistle can also be found at the new WordPress Theme Directory, in this page.

  • WordPress 2.5 visual editor CSS classes are now present, and thus:
    • The visual editor will be happy.
    • I’ll be able to host Thistle at the new WordPress Theme Directory.
  • Thistle 1.0.1’s static Meta widget was not updated to reflect the credit to me. Ouch.
  • Images now overflow the left column if necessary and are now visible over the sidebar.
  • Corrected inconsistencies in a couple other templates.
  • The theme’s PHP code has been edited to adhere to WordPress’s coding standards.

Thistle 1.0.1 (April 2, 2008)

  • 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 (December 5, 2007)

  • Initial release.

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