The Joy of Customization: Tubular

This project was one near and dear to my heart, mostly because of the TV series that the website represents.

Charlie Jade was a wonderful, gritty, atmospheric detective noir series with a little scifi mixed in for flavor. It was a Canadian-South African co-production that aired in Canada, South Africa and the UK in 2005-2006, but wasn’t sold to the US market in time to garner funding for a second season. The series is available on Region 2 DVD, and when word came out that SciFi Channel would begin airing the series in reruns in June 2008, there was the chance that good ratings might lead to a domestic DVD release.

But any hopes for that Region 1 DVD release, and for an official soundtrack release, were dashed by the SciFi Channel’s sudden decision to change the broadcast time of the reruns they acquired from Friday nights at 9pm to Tuesday mornings at 3am… after only airing the first two episodes.

Before that happened though, series creator Robert Wertheimer had agreed to do a podcast of creator commentary for the show for FarPoint Media, and we had completed half of the commentaries before SciFi Channel made the broadcast change. After the switch, we still managed to get commentaries done for all but one episode (a pivotal one, unfortunately), and there’s going to be a complete, finite podcast series once the discussions and final interview are finished in July.

The site started out in May 2008 with the Dust theme, because it had the rotating banner I wanted to use, but it wasn’t until April 2009 when I chose to take the Studio Press Tubular theme and do some heavy modifications to get the look I wanted, including adding in that rotating banner code.

The base Tubular theme turned out to be a good fit, and easy to modify away from it’s intended feature video design to the sectioned layout I wanted on the front page, and the only changes I needed to make to existing posts was to use larger versions of the images and add custom fields for the front page thumbnails.

I got the colorful yet industrial feel I wanted in the theme, with most of the information that’s good for newcomers to Charlie Jade being easy enough to find to help get them started.

Site: Charlie Jade Verse
Theme: Tubular

The Joy of Customization: mimbo3

I was intrigued when I found mimbo2 last year… it seemed to be the perfect layout for a blog idea that a handful of us had been keeping on the back burner for a couple years: Deep Geeking.

The term “Deep Geeking” comes from a description of what we do when we fall into intense analysis and discussion of a topic; in this case, the source topic was Babylon 5 and what we do on the podcast: in-depth discussion of the episodes and the deeper topics of character and theme. I loved the name, and one of the show’s fans registered the domain for our later use. It was 2 years before I actually got around to setting up a website for it.

I liked the way mimbo2 did article images, and my experience with the way arthemia2 handled images made customizing how I wanted those images to appear using mimbo a fairly easy modification to incorporate as well.

I wasn’t 100% happy with my final look at the time, but it served a purpose.

Then along came mimbo3, and most of the nagging questions I had in my mind about some functionality had been addressed… but the part I liked the most about mimbo2 had been excised completely: article image management.

I may be in the minority, but I like Custom Fields for specific image usage and placement. I like having the option to use one image for a thumbnail and having a different image for an internal article image, if there is one. It’s more interesting, to me personally.

So my challenge was to do some extreme hacking on a child theme for mimbo3 to regain that Custom Field image usage that I adore, while keeping the rest of the layout the same. Since the child theme vintagegreen was close in style to the mimbo2 look I liked and wanted, that’s what I used for my base.

While mimbo3 and its use of child themes seemed as if it would be more work at first, needing to only make changes to a child theme changed my mind about using them… I had been ambivalent about them before, but now I see the upside to them. I don’t know if I’m completely sold on them yet, since I’m not the kind of person who’ll update a base theme frequently enough to need a better solution to keeping my customizations, but I can better appreciate the advantages of them now that I’ve had time to work with them.

Site: Deep Geeking
Theme: mimbo3 / vintagegreen (child theme)

The Joy of Customization: Streamline

The first of the newly rebranded Studio Press designs that I played with was Streamline. It turned out to be the dream theme I knew was possible but hadn’t ever found until it was released.

For a little over two years, I had been keeping an eye out for a new blog-style theme to implement on the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas website. I’d always seen things that came close, but nothing ever struck me as being perfect or near-perfect for what I wanted to do, that matched the vague idea I had in mind for the site’s new look… until Streamline came out.

The front page article listing was exactly what I wanted to use for normal paging throughout the site, and the use of the larger icons with the article listings was the perfect match I’d been looking for.

I had to make a few modifications to get the front page layout style to act as the default article listing throughout the site, but the end result was exactly what I had in mind. Slight modifications to the banner were needed to make it fit the new theme sizing, but those were easily implemented by the graphics guru who’d done the original banner.

This one was one of the fastest and easiest customizations I’ve done, and the result was well worth the wait. But there was one odd drawback that I haven’t resolved yet… my favorite contact form stopped working.

I love WordPress-Ready Contact Form, from the Beast-Blog guys; I’ve used it on at least 10 different websites, and that’s in addition to at least another 10 non-WP sites that use the both the v2 and v3 standalone version of the form. But after I customized this Streamline install, the contact form ceased to work, and even more disturbing was that the Configuration admin page for the form stopped loading.

So for the time being I’ve switched to Contact Form 7, until I get the time to sit down and figure that particular failure out… or post something on the Studio Press support forums and ask for a set of fresh eyes to spot what might be the cause of this conflict, because I haven’t tracked it down yet.

Site: Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas
Theme: Streamline

The Joy of Customization: arthemia2

I think arthemia and arthemia2 were the first magazine style WordPress themes I came across that caused me to imagine a variety of customized configurations to implement on several websites I had that had been languishing and were badly in need of being transformed.

Since 1996, I’d had two very popular websites on a single domain. In 2008, I decided it was time to clear up the focus of those sites, and finally update them from the hand-rolled HTML sites they’d been stuck on since 2003.

When it came to redesigning wildhorse.com, I wanted to refocus the site to my original idea: equine art and artists, news about wild horse preservation and about equine rescue efforts. That meant that I needed to split off the very popular Miami Vice related content off onto it’s own site, and could not put that task off any longer.

First up was redesigning wildhorse.com to be The Wild Horse. Copying the old HTML listings and converting them to WordPress articles was the easy part, but I spent about a week rearranging the categories several times, just because I wasn’t completely happy with the old designations I’d used. The new site has been up for months, and I’m still tweaking. Redoing the images, and going through all of the old artists links to see what sites are still working and what sites need to be removed from the artists directory is an ongoing task at this point, but the new wildhorse.com launched on August 1, 2008, and has had a pretty decent reception. It’s still going to take a while to get the traffic back up to where it was back in 2003-2004, but that’s for another article.

Next up was creating Miami Vice Chronicles. Setting up the site was a snap, and customizing Arthemia Free was a lot easier and a lot more fun than I’d originally anticipated. But it took nearly two months to convert the several hundred individually hand-rolled HTML pages for the Episode Guide, the Music Guide, the cast information, and the old news and articles into Wordpress articles! Add in the time it took to rework or rescan many of the images (I’d used lower resolution images back in the days before broadband), and the project I’d started in September was finally ready to launch in December. Being the Miami Vice fan that I am, I chose to launch the new site on Dec 15, which is Don Johnson’s birthday.

Since there isn’t a ton of new Miami Vice related news coming out these days, blogging is occasional, but it’s the episode guide and music guide that are the big draw, and I’m hoping the new design and layout of the image galleries and listings still appeal to both the casual and die-hard fan.

Note: the links to both arthemia and arthemia2 download the same theme code, but the first link contains some helpful instructions that are not included in the second link, thus the reason for including both links.

Site: The Wild Horse
Site: Miami Vice Chronicles
Theme: arthemia2 (since renamed Arthemia Free)

The Joy of Customization

Over the past year, I think I’ve become addicted to customizing WordPress themes.

I have an idea in my head about how I want some of my sites to look like, but I’ve never seen one theme that had all the components or layout areas that I’d imagined. I’d always want one idea from one theme, and another idea from a second theme, and a tweak of an idea from yet another theme.

Isn’t that’s how Dr. Frankenstein started out… or was that Dr. Moreau…

I’ve never had the inclination to write a theme from scratch… as far as I’m concerned, I’ve still got a lot to learn about CSS. But I can read the code, and I know what to change and how to change it to get the look that I want. The same thing goes for tweaking the PHP framework of the themes.

Over the past six months or so, my favorites for customizing have been arthemia2 by Michael Jubel, and the Revolution Two themes (which are no longer free, alas). I had fun with Mimbo2, with both Branford Magazine and Wynton Magazine, and also with the original Revolution themes that were purchased for the massive number of websites that fall under my other creative hat (more on that later).

I ended up using arthemia2 as a base on three consecutive sites. I found myself taking pieces from Revolution Two themes and plugging them into heavily customized Original Revolution themes. I’ve mixed and matched pieces from different themes to get close to a look that I could see in my mind, and sometimes it worked, and other times I had to scrap it and begin again. And in one case, my graphics design weakness became a challenge to sidestep.

But I’m going to continue to see what pieces from what themes I can mix and match into what new concoctions.

I may turn this into a series of what I customized and why, since there were so many that have fallen under the code tweaking knife.