QPwilm! wordpress theme

Saturday, Apr 7th, 2007
Categories: projects

Now that my new site is up and running, I have decided to generify the design and clean up the code a little bit, add some documentation and release it as a Word Press theme. It’s based off of a theme called Qwilm! designed by Lokesh Dhakar and rebuilt by Oriol Sanchez. I remixed the theme, added a bit of typographicalization and a dash of code politely-appropriated from Kubrick (the default wp theme). I’m calling it QPwilm!

It’s definitely for the 1024×768 and 1280×1024 crowd, but it’s got qwilm!’s elasticity for smaller monitors. i ♥ big type. next up, i’m working on getting the theme fully validated. Since I made this theme to suit my own site, it features varying out-of-the-box support for a bunch of handy wp plugins and widgets, which pretty much makes it WP 2.1 and above. The template pages detect if a plugin is installed, so the theme is essentially plugin independant, which means that you can use or not use any of the following plugins at your descretion:

WP Admin Bar Reloaded - Should be included with the WP install
Bunny’s Technorati Tags
Flickr Badge Widget
Gravatars2
Run For Cover Widget - Last.fm widget
Sidebar Widgets - so cool!
Sideblog Wordpress Plugin - a sweet ‘asides’ implementation
Sticky Menu - more control over your pages nav

You can download it directly from me here or you can test the demo (it ain’t pretty) and download it at the official Wordpress themes site, enjoy!

Version Info

Current version: 1.2 - Apr 22 ‘07 - I added support for “WP Admin Bar Reloaded” and fixed “QPwilm!” link in sidebar.
1.1 - initial release

Making the theme pretty

There are notes in the stylesheet, to have floating text wrapped images. Try applying classes to the image:

class="alignleft" - example
class="alignright" - example
class="centered"

There are notes in the stylesheet to change the header style, there are three styles:

blog name and description in live text left-aligned
blog name in live text in floating red badge
blog name in image in floating red badge

Column widths were designed to compliment Flickr’s square, thumbnail, small and medium sized images:

3 small vertically oriented images in a row - example
2 small horizontally oriented images in a row - example
1 medium horizontally oriented image - example
5 square images in a row - example

The nav bar hasn’t been set up for child pages - i’ll fix this in the next version

Comments:

cyclingplatypus said,

April 18, 2007 @ 3:22 pm

Very nice theme!

Hans said,

April 18, 2007 @ 3:31 pm

wow :) great mod :) I’ve also built my theme from the code of Qwilm… nice one ain’t it? it’s easy to tweak but also works both on IE and firefox…..

as for the download on the wordpress theme sites… I won’t advise you to continue waiting…since I’ve already released 2 themes and I’ve yet not got my password lol….can’t blame them….. with all those themes they sure are busy…

I’m still tweaking that theme of mine called myJournal(even if I made it available for download :(

there’s an issue with the Qwilm theme and ultimately your theme too… try viewing it on an 800×600 resolution monitor, the sidebar breaks and gets at the bottom…..many people are still with an 800×600, mostly 30% from what my stats tell me and sure that’s not fun to view my site without sidebar content lol :)

I’m also trying to validate my theme before releasing a second version….

hey if you need help with the sidebar issue, do tell me and I would be glad to help you….

would you mind, I put your theme among my theme download section…under a favs section to recommend it to people…

Ed Fladung said,

April 19, 2007 @ 8:45 am

Hey Hans, my stats are a little different, 800×600 only make up 6% 3% of my viewers. on top of that, I assume that a good portion of those are people doing google searches for content that has nothing to do with my site. When i resize the browser to 800×600 and both sidebars drop to the bottom, I’m ok with that, I actually like sites with bottom sidebars. i’m not ok with it not validating, but most of the errors i get seem to be from html inserted from various plugins and widgets, but if you have any advice, i’d surely take it, especially on validation. thanks!

Steve said,

April 19, 2007 @ 10:38 am

Nice work on this skin/theme. I especially like the browser resize mod with the 2/3 columns… hot !!
There was a time in my design life when red and grey never ever played well together … you’re pulled it off though with the white blocks and the reversed white on red titles.

8/6 is dead man …. we’re even telling almost all our clients to move on up .. I’m sure 97% of your audience are seeing 1024 just fine !

Hans said,

April 22, 2007 @ 4:29 am

I would suggest you reading the quick tips from Elliott Back on valid XHTML….. actually making your blog valid xhtml is extremely easy once you’ve got the grip of the basics and the appropriate tools…please subscribe to my feeds since I shall be posting a much more detailed article based from the tips of Elliott but with the required tools for making things easier…

some tips that you could apply right now is :
1) try validating your homepage first….. for e.g if you were on a post, you would be calling some plugins like on mine, the myavatar plugins which make my page invalid….. so don’t tire yourself now with the plugins issue…your homepage won’t be calling many that works only on post page….on my blog I give the link to validate only my homepage(which is valid xhtml) since any single post would be invalid because of the myavatar plugins :)
2)make sure to add the alt attribute to your image…this to make things easier : turn off the visual editor from your options or user section and use the img button from your dashboard…this will pop up a dialog box asking for the image location and then the alt text..which I found much easier…
3)when I tried validating the page I’m currently on, it gives me some error which I think you could fix rather easily like substituting & with & from the Flickr badge code :)

and many more simple stuffs like this, some of which I think you already know….. I also came by some plugins that I shall be posting in the post… Hope this could help

Also I like reading 456 Berea Street for my daily dose on web standards etc…

what’s your favourite blog on web standards etc :)

Hans said,

April 22, 2007 @ 4:31 am

oh for the amp I meant & amp ; (without the spaces :)

Kuba said,

July 13, 2007 @ 6:34 am

Hi! Thanks for the best Wordpress theme I’ve ever saw! I decided to use it for my new blog (zasina.blink.pl/lodzioholik). I modified your’s theme, but I don’t know, how to use nice “Column widths were designed to compliment Flickr’s square, thumbnail, small and medium sized images”. Can you help me?

Mike Hedge said,

September 10, 2007 @ 7:17 pm

great theme wish I understood a bit more wordpress stuff to understand it completely

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