A whole new theme

It’s been a long overdue project, but the builders have been in and given the place a thorough going over. The theme was built from scratch in order to provide OSL with a more flexible blogging environment. I liked the previous simplicity a lot but I found that it didn’t quite meet my slightly diverse blogging needs. I have built up a network of sites I contribute to and I wanted to focus on them without feeling that my primary blog was being left out of the fun. I have a lifestream setup on shanemarriott.com that absorbs nearly everything I do online so I didn’t want that here also. My old blog at phrixus.co.uk was still pulling in a lot of visitors probably due to its longevity. It has been around for years and needed a shake-up, with this in mind, I will be closing it’s doors when I get the chance to find a good way of redirecting visitors to new locations.

All of the thumbnail generation is done automatically. You can specify the main image in the post editor or the theme will use what it has to hand. This means that if you don’t select a key image in the editor, the template will look at any images in your post and use the first one to generate the thumbnails. These are cached in order to preserve the performance. If there are no images, it will use a default image.

I have some great ideas on how to incorporate jQuery to enhance a few aspects but I will limit those on the public version. A lot of the functionality such as “Related Posts” has been built into the theme so that the reliance on resource hogging plugins can be reduced which was a primary aim of the theme. Even the tweet on the homepage is fetched by the template functions.

Ultimately, this theme will be made available on one of the WordPress theme websites. I have a bit of work to do on the backend before that though. If you feel particularly helpful, have a look around and let me know if you have any ideas or, more importantly, find any problems. Both are important! Thanks!