A few months ago I installed Steam as one of my blog’s themes. I got an email from Eric S. Raymond yesterday asking for a copy of the theme, since the original author doesn’t seem to have it available any longer. I’m happy to oblige! The following files are available:
- Samir’s “as-released” Steam 1.5;
- A patch file which adds theme-switcher support to Steam 1.5;
- Steam 1.5.1, which is merely 1.5 with the above patch.
I figured that I might as well write up a little “how-to” as long as I was going through the effort of packaging this theme. This isn’t necessarily “best practices”, it’s just what I did and it seemed to work.
The patch was created per this article. The 1.5.1 theme was packaged using gnutar:
tar -czvf steam-1.5.1.tgz steam-1.5.1/*
To use this theme, download Steam 1.5.1 to your WordPress’ wp-content/themes directory. If your web browser doesn’t automatically extract the files, use gnutar:
tar -xzf steam-1.5.1.tgz
If you have Ryan’s wpthemeswitcher installed, activated, and your current theme supports it, you should be all set. Otherwise, go to your blog’s admin page then select “Presentation” then “Themes”, then select the theme you’d like to use, (presumably Steam 1.5.1).
Hope this helps!
Just thinking about what still needs to be done to get tags support in my other themes…
Steam will need to have 4 files modified:
- archive.php
- index.php
- sidebar.php
- and single.php
I’ve already modified at least one of these files for other reasons, but I have saved original copies of all the files that have been/need to be modified.
I need to clean up my earlier work on Borderline Chaos, and then add tags support to it. I’ve got the original theme files in another directory, still need to see which files I’ve already changed. Files to be modified for tags support:
- 404.php
- archives.php
- index.php
- links.php
- search.php
- sidebar.php
- single.php
Sigh…
Elvgren looks like only index.php needs to be modified. I don’t remember if I have already modified this theme, so I’ll need to download a fresh copy.
Journalized-Blue and Sharepoint Like are already finished. The WordPress Default and the pirate theme (”Yaaarr, ’tis me blog!”) will probably remain tag-less, and may even be deprecated. The WordPress Classic theme will certainly be removed.
I installed Steam, a theme by Samir M. Nassar, this morning. It didn’t include the theme switcher, so I bolted that on. I still want to add a calendar to this theme. Samir did a very thorough job on this, great work!
I think I finally replaced all the hard-coded unicode out of “Sharepoint like”, but I still need to see how WordPress handles i18n so I can fix this properly. I really wish I could give credit for this theme. If somebody knows who the author is, please drop a comment.
When I was searching for a theme a few days ago, I really wanted a theme that allowed as much “real estate” as possible for articles, while still displaying the necessary bloggy bits, e.g. archive links, search box, “meta” box, etc. This requirement makes three design features very desirable: a smaller masthead; one sidebar (plus articles=two columns); and a floating-width article column (to take advantage of the full browser window). And of course the theme has to be aesthetically pleasing.
I came up with a list of about a dozen themes that had some feature(s) that I liked. The list is below, in reverse alpha order.
- Yadda, by John Hesch, has a clean, minimalist look, but the fixed width layout is a show-stopper for me.
- Wuhan, by Meng Gao, looks nice, but another fixed width layout, and the masthead is a bit too big for me.
- Steam, by Samir M. Nassar, fits all my criteria and looks clean. In fact, this theme looks even better than I remember! I will be adding this to the themes on my blog. The only minor issue I have with this theme is that several short articles one after another seem to blend together. Also I would prefer to add a calendar to the archives box. (Easy enough to fix.)
- Spirit, by BB Iverson, looks great. It’s a 3-column layout, which I didn’t want, but it does have a short masthead and fluid width so it fills the browser window. I’m also not a fan of textured backgrounds, mostly due to the bandwidth. (The memory of a 33 kb/s modem link is still fresh in my memory.)
- Simple Green, by Priss, is another minimalist theme. In fact, at under 5 kB (yes, 5 kilobytes!) it may be the tightest theme which actually does the job.
- The theme “Sharepoint like” looks very good, but the WRC Viewer links for it are broken. Alex King’s theme contest page has the theme available for download, but some of the theme text (not documentation, viewable blog text) is in Greek or Russian or something. Another minimalist theme (amazing how they keep turning up in this list…), full window width, single sidebar layout. I like it quite a bit, but didn’t load it earlier because I wasn’t able to find a download for it until today. I’ll be translating the text over the next day or two.
- Psycho looks pretty good, except the blog title runs under the rest of the sidebar for multi-word titles. Probably easy to fix. I like how the articles stand out from each other on this theme.
- Journalized is very nice, especially the blue theme. The only thing I don’t like is the 3-column layout, but this theme may be worth breaking the single-sidebar guideline.
- Head (get your mind out of the gutter!), another theme by Priss, is very striking. Alas, it is a 3-column layout, and multiple entries on the same day blend together a bit.
- “Green ACT” looks good, although it’s a fixed-width layout. But the real problem is that I can’t find a download for it.
- “Fullwidth” (available on Weblogs.us theme repository) has a very nice layout with a high proportion of real estate set aside for article text. But this layout is just too grey for me.
Already mentioned in an earlier post were “Elvgren” and “Borderline Chaos”, both of which are already installed on my blog. See the earlier article for my opinions on these themes.
