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Themes, Themes Everywhere
Published April 13th, 2006Untagged
Ok, so we’re now running a copy of 3K2 as the theme for this site based on the K2 mod. It’s rather nice and shiny, especially the instant search feature but there are a number of ‘features’ [read 'bugs'] which I’ve yet to resolve, it’s also a motherf**er to customise with chunks of code lying around just about everywhere (this speeds things up though).
I had previously jazzed up a copy of Painted Desert using my own images, header randomisation and sensible colours:
but one of my friends IMed me to say:
that is very ugly
and I thought I’d better have another go (thanks for that by the way Dave!)
I’m still ambivalent as to the best gallery package, in the past I’ve tried Copeprmine, Gallery 2, and a host of other things most recently customising plogger (and promising to release my mods as a plug-in, which I never got around too - oops!)
I’m very tempted to use flicker like the rest of the world seems to, and starting to post social photos on facebook, I just don’t like the idea of being tied to a service which can legitimately decide they want to start charging me £xx per year. Having said that I’m going to have to trot off and find a host after June this year (when I graduate) and it would save on the size needed I guess.
Webdesign eats time and effort, huh? :)
Hey,
You mention you’re having problems with the theme’s features (bugs?!) :) Can I be of help? What kind of problems are you having. I’m the guy who ported K2 to 3K2.
Oh hi!
Thanks for the post. Generally I really like the theme (I think the 3-colum layout is greatly preferable to K2’s two) but I still have a number of issues with it.
Some of these problems have now been corrected and I’ve marked these where appropriate but the following have caused headaches:
• My two main problems are probably related:
o The search box in top right only works dynamically about ¾ of the time, sometimes it loads just as the standard search; sometimes when I use it the page just goes blank and no content loads
o Unexplained loading problems with the “< - Older�?, “Newer ->�? buttons which only succeed in loading perhaps one in 10 times
• Speed problems. Sometimes the pages load fine (5-10 seconds, still a bit slow but tolerable) but every few times a refresh take 40-50 seconds or more to complete (which is just horrific)
• Left sidebar styles are very different to the right sidebar (notably headers and li list-type) [now altered to my satisfaction] /> • MAJOR problems with widths of the various columns - hard to blame one in particular Colum because they’re all inter-related but things had a nasty tendency to overlap [now fixed]
o The livecalendar plug-in breaks the size every time I try to use it, and it’s unimportant so I’ve just turned it off for now
o Images seem unresponsive to change in the class “#primary img “ which meant that they were sticking out of the edges when too large and “width:�? statements didn’t correct this but the problem went away when the primary size was reduced.
• I was playing with widgets and noticed that the sidebars appear on the wrong sides of the screen while setting up the widget locations in the admin page setup
• Problems with images in posts. My preferred format is a div box using float to the appropriate position so that I can add captions. However, with 3K2 whenever an mage is placed inside a div (inside the page_entry box) the image border appears but the image doesn’t load in Firefox (but loads in IE and in WP-admin). I haven’t fixed this yet because it’s lox priority. I found a temporary fix of “style=’width: auto; height: auto;display: block;’ “ but I’m just not using this captioned style for now.
also
• Something slightly odd happened when I moved the buttons to the bottom right. I seemed to fain an extra 2 or 3 pixels and had to force the menu bar down by this amount.Other comments /thoughts on the theme would be:
• Very minor but it would be nice to put smilies in the middle of the lines looks much prettier :)
• Having a link to the admin pages is nice
• There’s no link to the rss for comments for the whole site (only for particular posts)
I’ve put a list of the other plugins I’m running here in case there might be some kind of conflict (but I don’t think so). I actually have other problems with several plugins but I’m fairly sure they’re nothing to do with 3K2 so I won’t bore you with them :)
I hope this is useful; no theme is perfect and in general I feel this is the best theme I’ve used so I plan to keep using it (although fixing the dynamic bits are important to me) and I’ll be doing some more modding as time allows.
Cheers
Nick
Hum,
also the style for commented lists could be improved (looking at previous comment):: loads up CSS editor to fix it ::
I’m fairly sure this isn’t deliberate but you’re also missing:
from “search.php” (which is called if you press enter in the search bar, or if livesearch is disabled…
(and the blockquote background is defined as “white” which it shouldn’t be because it upsets the commenting for the blog owner- found that out like 2 seconds ago when I posted this entry :) )
Hi,
Some of the issues you mentioned have been mentioned by others before, so I fixed them already. Specifically, the fact the left sidebar was missing from the search results page, and the fact that left sidebar styles didn’t match the right sidebar styles. I’ve updated the theme .zip file with these fixes.
As for some of the other issues you mentioned:
- I couldn’t replicate the ‘bug’ where the search box works dynamically only some of the time. It appears to work all the time for me. And noone ever mentioned this before. Weird. Let me know if you figure out anything.
- I also couldn’t replicate the bug where you mentioned ‘older’ and ‘newer’ buttons only load 1 in 10 times. Noone mentioned this before either. Could it be due to some of your customizations? I’ve noticed that you have forgot to close some html tags in your code in a few places. Like currently where it says ‘3k2 theme by hakan aydin’, there’s a missing <a href tag.
- About the speed problems, I haven’t used this theme with a blog that has a lot of posts, so maybe I shouldn’t comment on speed, but I haven’t noticed any slowness so far. I noticed there are some SQL queries failing in your site at the moment. Maybe those failing SQL queries are causing the slowdown? I see the following error message in each and every post you have in your blog:
WordPress database error: [Table 'ncac2.wp_tags' doesn't exist]
SELECT DISTINCT t.tag FROM wp_tags t INNER JOIN wp_post2tag p2t ON p2t.tag_id = t.tag_id INNER JOIN wp_posts p ON p2t.post_id = p.ID AND p.ID=144 ORDER BY t.tag ASC
I’ll try to address the other issues in another comment :)
Thanks for the reply.
sorry your comment didn’t appear straight away, I had to save it from spam karma :)
regarding the styles I must have been using an older version, I think I got it from one of the theme sites… maybe http://webdesignbook.net/themes/ so perhaps they’re hosting an older version. I’d already fixed these by the time I read your post.
I’ve fixed pretty much everything I wasn’t happy with. I have a feeling that the speed issues are linked to the way the javascript ajax accesses the database but I’m not certain about this. I’ve been fiddling a lot so it’s hard to be certain which change fixed it.
I think that the problem was that I did a database backup with WP 1.5, installed WP 2 and later restored only some of the tables from the WP 1.5 backup (I hadn’t realised there were significant database changes) this meant I had half of the tables form WP 1.5 and half from WP 2. It worked but gave very subtle problems. I believe that the speed and javascript load problems were caused by this (although the tags you noticed were unrelated - turning a plugin off after adding a non-conditional code-loop).
Anyway, everything is punky dorey now, so I’m a happy camper (well apart from my continuing use of mixed metaphors) �
Thanks for the assist