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Leon Paternoster

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Introducing the Velouria theme for WordPress

September 7, 2008. 34 comments.

Please note that this theme is no longer supported. You might want to try one of my newer, better coded themes instead.

Simplifying The Guardian’s header →

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Comments

Sander says:

September 9, 2008 at 11:15 am

I like the simplicity of the theme, although I wonder how many blogs (websites) use a simple column weblog. With the color scheme used you have to use colored images to visually enhance the look & feel. With the images it seems that the text starts one line and is not lined with the image.

I like the archives page, do you care to share the code of the archives? Looking to do a similar thing at my blog but I cannot find how to do it. Thank you in advance.

Good luck with designing and releasing wordpress themes!
Leon says:

September 9, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Hi again Sander – thanks for the comments.

I doubt many people do use a single-column theme, but I think it’s appropriate for a blog-only site. I’m getting some vibes that you’re not a huge fan of this theme! ;)

Could you give me an example of text and pictures not lining up? I have to admit that graphics aren’t my forte – icons are kind of a new thing for me (and I’m guessing it shows!)

I’ll email you the archive code. It’s simple: query_posts is your friend! I don’t like the way wp does archives (dates are a meaningless way of organising posts, and subjective tags and categories aren’t much better), so you just rewrite archives.php and create a new page using it as a template.

Cheers,

Leon
Sander says:

September 9, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Sorry for the misunderstanding, I do like the theme, but I doubt if single column blogs are popular for download. Did you also add it to the wordpress themes downdloads?

I will send you a screenshot of the images and text. Thank you very much for sending the archives code, appreciated.
Leon says:

September 9, 2008 at 7:22 pm

Ah – I see what you mean.

That’s because the image lies beneath an h5, which has no bottom margin.

I’ll work on a fix, but it’s not a problem that’s going to crop up much!

Ta for the screenshot,

Leon
John Baker says:

September 15, 2008 at 4:53 pm

I like the clean look and may be able to live without a sidebar.
But I’m not keen on excerps being used on the front page. What would I have to do to see complete entries on the front page?
John Baker says:

September 15, 2008 at 5:03 pm

I also seem to have a problem with the archive page. I follow your instructions above about creating a page and selecting ‘Archives’ as its template.
But when I link to that page it shows nothing apart from the title.
Leon says:

September 15, 2008 at 6:05 pm

Hi again John,

You’ll have to change a line from the index.php file (the one that says php the_excerpt()). Replace php the_excerpt() with php the_content().

If you’re not comfortable doing that, email me and I’ll send you a modified theme.

Not sure about the second problem. Are you tagging posts ‘lead’? If you have no posts tagged ‘lead’ there could be problems.

— Leon
John Baker says:

September 15, 2008 at 8:08 pm

OK, that certainly makes the front page better.
But I can’t seem to do anything with the archive page. Yes, I have some posts tagged ‘lead’. And they show up on the front page under ‘must reads’.
I’m trying to do it like this – going into Write – Page from WP Admin. I give my new page the title ‘Posts’. But I don’t enter any further content, just leave the page blank. Down at the bottom of that screen, under Advanced Options – I open the drop-down box under Page Template and select ‘Archives’. Then I hit the ‘save’ button.
But when I go to have a look at the page it is blank apart from the title, ‘Posts’.
If any pointers come to mind I’ll be grateful.
John Baker says:

September 16, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Something else I discovered about the archive page.
It does give me a list of archives in IE and in Opera, but only a blank page in Firefox.
However, even in IE and Opera the page does not render with ‘lead’ pages and ‘extracts’ as it does in your Velouria Test Blog, but instead offers me the alternatives of browsing by category or by month.
Is this a clue?
Leon says:

September 17, 2008 at 1:03 pm

John – maybe. For some reason it’s using the default template to create the archive page. My archive template (archives.php doesn’t even mention months or categories, so you’ve somehow got the wrong file in there.

Try re-installing the theme.

The offer’s still open ;)
John Baker says:

September 17, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Reinstalling the theme works really good. Thank you.
John Baker says:

October 14, 2008 at 9:36 am

The archives problem was a conflict with a plugin. (Subscribe-to-Comments Plugin)
But a previous commentor had a problem with image lining up with text. I also have this problem now, see:
http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/six-characters-in-search-of-an-author/
for an example.
Is there some way around this, because as it is at the moment it ruins the page.
Leon says:

October 14, 2008 at 2:02 pm

John – not sure why it’s doing that — you have some extra ids and classes around that image that the theme hasn’t put there. Are you using any plugins to manage the images?

To get rid of all my image styling, delete lines 148-154 of the style.css file. That’s probably the quickest ‘fix’.
John Baker says:

October 14, 2008 at 9:15 pm

Leon, Thanks for the reply.
I tried deleting the lines you mention above but with no visible effect, so I put them back again.
I’m using wp 2.6.2 and it’s supposed to insert images automatically. I assume the other classes and ids you mention come out of that process.
I’m not using any other plugins.
Could be wp, I suppose, though I haven’t come across any reference to a problem like this on the forums. I’ll keep looking.
Leon says:

October 19, 2008 at 8:59 pm

John – I’ve redone the theme. Your problem should be solved. Check out the demo site first to see that you still want to use the theme, and then reinstall.

— Leon
Peter says:

October 22, 2008 at 11:30 am

Nice clean theme.

I’m not entirely convinced by the image issue. When I look at the demo page and choose : http://intothewhite.co.uk/test/velouria/?p=5 ( How Velouria styles your posts ), I see 3 identical images of a squirrel. These should be centered, left-floated and right-floated.
This is not the the case, they are all identically positioned : flush left ( and without the promised border )

It turns out that in the attached stylesheet ( http://intothewhite.co.uk/test/velouria/wp-content/themes/Velouria/style.css ) the classes imgleft and imgright are missing. In fact there are no images styles whatsoever.
Am I missing the obvious ?

BTW, simple page navigation with next & previous links in the footer would not go amiss …
Leon says:

October 22, 2008 at 12:49 pm

Hi Peter,

Many thanks for the comments. I’ve only just noticed that simplethemes is linking here.

Everything should be OK now – I was ‘manually’ floating images before: now you just need to float the images using wp’s UI (which just wraps the image in a class).

Leon
Leon says:

October 22, 2008 at 12:50 pm

Also – there are pagination links included in the theme.
Peter says:

October 22, 2008 at 2:03 pm

Excellent ! Thank you for responding so quickly.
All now looks as promised and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for making the theme available. I simply like these somewhat austere themes : no frills, no bells & whistles, no gadgets & widgets, no rainbow colours, no plugin overload, but just well presented text & the occasional image.
PS: my apologies for not spotting those pagination links.
Leon says:

October 22, 2008 at 4:04 pm

You’re welcome. There does seem to be a market for these themes.

As for the pagination, I may well change it slightly: floating the ‘next’ link to the right would make its purpose a lot clearer.

Ta,

—Leon
semiblanca says:

February 11, 2009 at 1:08 pm

FINALLY! finally i found a beautiful theme! thx :)
John Baker says:

February 20, 2009 at 11:01 am

Hi
I’ve been trying to move to a new server with PHP 5, and I’ve installed WP and reinstalled but have ended up once more with an installation that doesn’t quite work.
Everything looks OK and the speed is much faster, but the internal links on the blog become unstable. Perhaps 20% of the time a link is followed it registers correctly in the address bar but the actual link on the page goes elsewhere. If I click on, say ‘about’ the link might take me to the rss feed, or to the archives, anywhere but where I wanted to go.
Now, if I hit F5 I usually go to the correct link, but when I hit F5 repeatedly, the link is liable to go astray again.
I cannot detect a pattern here, the wrong links seem to happen erratically.
If I change over to the ‘Classic Theme” for WordPress everything works fine.
Do you have any idea why this might be the case?
The current installation which demonstrates this behaviour is at:
http://govindbaker.co.uk/
And the links which should demonstrate the problem are in the footer, under the heading: Info On This Site. Or any of the ‘post’ links.
Leon says:

February 20, 2009 at 11:52 am

Hi John,

I looked on the site and didn’t have any problems navigating.

I can’t see how this can be anything to do with my theme. The links are generated in the normal worpress way, e.g. the navbar uses wp_list_pages(), which isn’t deprecated yet.

Also, you’ve modded the theme quite extensively: try testing with my default theme to see if the problems persist.

I think you’ll need to get in contact with your hosting company.
John Baker says:

February 20, 2009 at 3:13 pm

Yes, this was, of course, a last resort. I also can’t see why it would be the theme.
I spoke with Pipe10 (the host) for several days, but they couldn’t come up with anything to explain it at their end either.
I’ll keep trying, but it’s looking increasingly as though PHP 5 is out-of-bounds for me for the time being.
Leon says:

February 21, 2009 at 7:07 am

Hi John – can’t see it being a PHP5 problem either. Without wanting to sound like IT support: have you tried disabling your plugins and then re-enabling them? I had a similar-ish problem when I moved host, and that sorted it (I think it was down to a backup plugin not working properly).
John Baker says:

February 21, 2009 at 8:43 am

Disabling Plugins was the first thing we tried. There are no plugins enabled in the current installation. It’s just a fresh installation of WP.
Thanks for trying, though.
william says:

January 18, 2010 at 7:00 am

I also seem to have a problem with the archive page. I follow your instructions above about creating a page and selecting ‘Archives’ as its template.
But when I link to that page it shows nothing apart from the title.cisco ccna
Leon says:

January 18, 2010 at 7:46 pm

Hi William,

I’m no longer supporting this theme, I’m afraid. You might want to try another theme.

Thanks,

Leon

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