December 29, 2008

Elegant Grunge 1.0 released

by Michael Tyson in Geekspeak

A significant update to my WordPress theme, Elegant Grunge, has been released. New features and fixes include:

  • Configurable sidebars! Choose from no sidebar, a sidebar on the right (the standard layout), or a double sidebar on the right!
  • Support for WP 2.7 paginated and threaded comments
  • Support for a custom header image – just enter a URL to an image, typically a transparent PNG, and it will appear in the header instead of the text (SEO friendly)
  • Some bug, compatibility and i18n fixes

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p>Note: If you have problems with this theme, please post your question at the WordPress forums. Please don’t contact me directly, as I don’t have the resources to help you.

One Comment

  1. Major
    December 30, 2008 at 7:49 am

    Hi Michael, it is the language file changed? Need to update italian translation? Cheers

    1. Michael
      December 31, 2008 at 9:41 am

      Ah yes – it has changed a little, Major. The default.po has been updated, just need to hit ‘update’ in Poedit

  2. Nicos
    December 30, 2008 at 8:44 am

    Hi Michael ! great theme ! I’ll keep you updated on how I use it. hope you’ll check it and check my photographs as well. Tweet to you soon ;)

  3. eric
    December 30, 2008 at 11:22 am

    love this one!

  4. CatSpit
    January 1, 2009 at 12:53 am

    I’m in the process of moving over to WP from Blogger and until I work my own design into the CSS I’ve chosen Elegant Grunge because, well.. It’s great. Solid work on this, classy theme. Thanks!

  5. Amy
    January 1, 2009 at 3:35 am

    Hi, Thanks for the update, I really like this theme. I just installed it and I’m not seeing the comment reply link in my comments. I’m using WP 2.7

    1. Michael
      January 1, 2009 at 10:32 am

      Hi Amy; are you using 1.0.1? This adds the Reply links

      1. Amy
        January 1, 2009 at 12:33 pm

        Oops! Nope, I must have missed that version, I have 1.0. Thanks!

  6. Ubi
    January 1, 2009 at 2:00 pm

    Hi Mike… gorgeous theme, thanks so much for sharing it with the world!

    I have been having trouble with images not centering in posts using the uploader. I am using the WP uploader and Lightbox 2.

    I just figured out that the photos that wouldn’t center were all captioned. So there is maybe a bug with the captions pushing a photo over to the far right (into the sidebar)?

    1. Hal Halvorsen
      January 8, 2009 at 9:06 am

      I have the same problem with captioned images as Ubi (using the same setup). They don’t center and float to the right.

  7. Todd
    January 4, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    Is it difficult to upgrade from elegant grunge 1.0 to 1.0.1?

    Thanks!

    1. Michael
      January 4, 2009 at 5:16 pm

      Nope!

  8. Todd
    January 4, 2009 at 5:18 pm

    Is there a read me file on how to do this?

    1. Michael
      January 4, 2009 at 5:26 pm

      There’s really not much to it. It’s the same process as with everything else… Just unzip and put the elegant-grunge directory into wp-content/themes, replacing what’s there.

      1. Todd
        January 4, 2009 at 5:28 pm

        TY! Michael, I just wanted to make sure that that’s what I was supposed to do. Love the theme btw… you rock and so does loopy

        1. Michael
          January 4, 2009 at 5:41 pm

          Thanks for the kind words Todd =) Let me know if you have any troubles

  9. bl
    January 4, 2009 at 6:49 pm

    Hello,

    First… a beautiful template! Thank you.

    I changed the width of the template and now the images have no more shadow. In the first posts everything was o.k. And also the layout crashes in the readmore page.

    I don’t know what happened. Can you help?

    positivefeeling.org Thanks bl

  10. Sebastian
    January 5, 2009 at 5:42 am

    Hi Mike,

    a great update !!! One thing I would really appreciate, would be to get also the sidebar background hidden, if a user wants to turn sidebars off … just as an idea … :-).

    Thanks a lot, Sebastian

    1. Michael
      January 7, 2009 at 10:12 am

      Thanks Sebastian, This is the main feature added by v1.0. Just turn the sidebar off to accomplish this

      1. Sebastian
        January 8, 2009 at 7:54 pm

        Hi Mike,

        sorry – I had a caching error so I was not able to recognize this when I tried to test this functionality. But what I will do is redesign my image.php that if you open an image from built in gallery a bigger size of the image will be shown. If you have any ideas, suggestions don’t hesitate to send me your input!

        Thanks for this great theme :-)!!! Sebastian

      2. morg
        February 4, 2009 at 2:43 am

        noob question how to turn off sidebar? i try remove all but the default sidebar appear

  11. Maria
    January 5, 2009 at 7:37 am

    Hi Michael:

    I am about to customize this gorgeous theme a little bit, just to bring a touch of pink. One of the template descriptions states: “A custom page template that allows complete customisation of the sidebar…”

    Does this mean that if I create a page about “Cooking”, for example, I can customize the side bars for that specific page to feature cooking stuff on the sidebars?

    Thanks for your time!

    1. Michael
      January 7, 2009 at 10:13 am

      Yes, that’s right Maria; if you look at the ‘music’ or ‘research’ sections on this page, you’ll see it in action.

  12. mantas
    January 5, 2009 at 7:41 am

    does this theme support widgets? i try to add widgets to the sidebar and i get a “Error: Cache location must be writable.” it is visible on the site i have linked. does anyone else have this problem? what should i do?

    1. Michael
      January 7, 2009 at 10:14 am

      Sounds like you’ve got a WP permissions problem, Mantas. Do some googling or ask for assistance at the WP forums.

  13. bl
    January 5, 2009 at 8:34 pm

    Good Morning,

    I found the solution. It was a plugin (exec.php).

    Bye bl

  14. blasfemo
    January 5, 2009 at 11:08 pm

    I have updated my wp blog to 2.7 and i have installed your theme, but i don’t have your same result ? Please help me..

    1. Michael
      January 8, 2009 at 9:21 am

      I just understood your question – it would appear that I incorrectly bundled version 1.0.1 when I uploaded it, and the images weren’t included at all. Sorry everyone – version 1.0.2 should be fine now

  15. Pete
    January 6, 2009 at 8:55 am

    Hi Michael – I’m a happy Elegant Grunge WordPress theme user. I was about to email you a few requests to add to the theme today and when I clicked through to your site I found the “new features” post. You’ve added half the changes I was going to ask for! Great work. Thanks for all your efforts. Drop by my site for some Canadian photography. Cheers. Pete

    1. Michael
      January 7, 2009 at 10:15 am

      Glad to hear it Pete! Cheers =)

  16. Jason Yormark
    January 8, 2009 at 7:02 am

    Hi Michael,

    Unique question. I can’t seem to figure out how to edit the header so that I can include social network icons to the top right.

    Basically I’m trying to add what you see here: http://www.jasonyormark.com/test.html

    To the top right of the header.

    Any suggestions?

    1. Michael
      January 8, 2009 at 9:30 am

      Hi Jason; What I usually do to add stuff to the header is:

      1. Create a file ‘custom.php’

      2. Put some html into custom.php, in a containing div; eg:

        <div id="badge"><!-- my content goes here --></div>

      3. Create a file ‘custom.css’

      4. Put CSS into there to style the content we just created; eg:

        #badge {
  position: absolute;
  top: 80px;
  left: 50%;
  margin-left: 300px;
}

      5. Open the theme’s header.php, and somewhere in the body section, add:

        <?php include('custom.php); ?>

      6. Append custom.css to style.css – on the terminal, you can do this:

        cat custom.css >> style.css

      That way, whenever you need to upgrade the theme, you can just re-insert the include, and re-append the custom.css and you’re done.

  17. Jason Yormark
    January 8, 2009 at 10:00 am

    I’ll try that. What about the last step about re-appending? Not sure I understand that. Couldn’t I just add the additional style parameters to the style.css file manually?

    1. Michael
      January 8, 2009 at 10:03 am

      Well yeah, but if you keep it in custom.css and just copy that to style.css whenever you upgrade, you don’t risk losing your carefully crafted css – you just copy it over each time.

      1. Jason Yormark
        January 8, 2009 at 10:12 am

        Got it. So I tried this but get the following error message on my site:

        Warning: Unexpected character in input: ”’ (ASCII=39) state=1 in /home/jasonyor/public_html/wp-content/themes/elegant-grunge/header.php on line 80

        Warning: include(customphp) [ function.include ]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/jasonyor/public_html/wp-content/themes/elegant-grunge/header.php on line 80

        Warning: include() [ function.include ]: Failed opening ‘customphp’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/jasonyor/public_html/wp-content/themes/elegant-grunge/header.php on line 80

        1. Michael
          January 8, 2009 at 10:19 am

          Sounds like you probably made a typo or put something in the wrong place… The WP forums should be able to help you from here

  18. Jason Yormark
    January 8, 2009 at 10:59 am

    Thanks. Figured it out.

    Sorry to be pain, but one last question. As you can see, I figured out how to manuever it where I want it, but for the life of me, can’t get it to stop from spreading out the icons. The custom.php file has them in a table with a set width, but it still spreads them out.

    Is there a CSS style I need to incorporate?

    1. Jason Yormark
      January 8, 2009 at 11:06 am

      Scratch that. Figured it out! Needed to move the php call outside a menu tag.

  19. lomodeedee
    January 8, 2009 at 6:48 pm

    Hi Michael!

    Tnx a lot for sharing your cool design for WP community. I did upgrade of the theme, it looks now more layered and expanded… i’m running it in WP2.7., but the only problem is that on small screens like on Asus Eee the page seems to be broken… is there any piece of code that we can all add in Stylesheet to make it more suitable for smaller screens… to have fixed columns or something? sorry for bothering and thanks in advance… best, deborah

    1. Michael
      January 9, 2009 at 11:54 am

      Hi deborah, I’m not entirely sure, without spending some time experimenting. Perhaps a min-width on the ‘body’ element in the stylesheet? If you’re after a “mobile” display version, you’ll probably want to entirely redesign the page anyway (like the way mobile phone-friendly pages are completely different to standard ‘desktop’ pages).

  20. Jason Yormark
    January 9, 2009 at 11:43 am

    Which parameters in the file(s) or css controls the whitespace between posts on the front page and also the comments section?

    These are spaced out a bit more then I would like and want to tighten them up a bit. For the life of me I can’t find this.

    1. Michael
      January 9, 2009 at 11:48 am

      Does 1.0.2 solve this at all for you, Jason? I tightened up the spacing between title and post body. (Not the comments though) For posts, you’re probably after the ‘.hr’ class. For comments, probably margin-top of .commentlist li.

    2. Jason Yormark
      January 9, 2009 at 11:57 am

      Thanks. The hr class worked, but margin-top parameter doesn’t seem to do the trick.

      1. Michael
        January 9, 2009 at 12:01 pm

        Try setting margin-top to a negative number?

      2. Jason Yormark
        January 9, 2009 at 12:06 pm

        Jackpot. Thanks as always.

  21. Hadiansyah
    January 9, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    Dear Michael,

    thank you for the best work for your themes, i really like it and that were my first and current themes on my web.

    But there’s something i’d like to ask, there’s something wrong when i insert an image and using a caption the image will go more to the right side (not centered) this problem won’t happen if the image not using a caption.

    Would you inform me the soultion?

    Reegards

  22. mete
    January 11, 2009 at 10:36 pm

    Thank you for this theme. I really like it. :)

  23. nick
    January 13, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Hi Michael, I really loved your elegant grunge theme.. great job! however I do have a question :), I’m a totally new to this… would you please tell me how I can add more items to the menu bar I really like the way you have it set As: Home, about, music, photography and so forth…thank you so much…Nick.

    1. Michael
      January 13, 2009 at 12:13 pm

      Thanks, Nick. These are just WP pages – create them in WP admin. See the WP documentation for more info.

  25. Drew
    January 13, 2009 at 9:41 pm

    Hey Michael, I love the theme. In the search bar, some letters don’t quite fit – like ‘p’ or ‘y’. Is there any way to decrease the font size in that box – so it fits? The rest of the theme works like a charm. Thanks again!

  26. Jane
    January 14, 2009 at 7:38 pm

    Lovely theme, but I’ve had a search engine problem since installing – have no idea if it’s related, but I didn’t change anything else. My google search used to give post titles and show the “more results from” link. Now for some reason a google of my site is showing archives (November (3), December (7)) and nothing else.

  28. andrew
    January 16, 2009 at 1:35 am

    Hi Michael – great theme – thank you!

    That thing you say about: “Support for a custom header image…” – where do i put the URL: in the WP editor > header.php, and then..?

    1. ilz
      January 18, 2009 at 1:59 am

      ANDREW–

      From the wordpress dashboard, go to Appearance> Elegant Grunge> You’ll see the top spot of that page has a place for the header image.

      Hope that helps!

      1. Andrew
        January 18, 2009 at 4:36 am

        yes – thanks ilz!

  29. ilz
    January 18, 2009 at 1:49 am

    Thanks a ton for the theme man! I stretched the right column out to fit some ads, I’m loving the look.

    Check it out here

    I can’t wait to get some pics up to use the “photoblog” feature!

Comments are closed.