Although the fan-tas-tic project is making good progress, I’m running to some issues which slows down the overall progress: This post is a short status update.

Issue 1: Internet Explorer still sucks.

Even version 7. And I have no high expectations for IE8, no matter how many tests it’ll pass.
I had to tweak a lot of CSS code just to make sure IE7 doesn’t screw up my layout, although it was fine enough in FF and Chrome.

A relief is that a bigger part (65%) of my visitors do use FF. An explanation for this is that the audience mostly consist of bloggers, designers and developers. They already know IE sucks.
However on my soccerforum IE is used by 53% of the visitors. This just confirms the theory about the audience of the sites. And because I’m expecting a mixed audience for Fan-tas-tic!, I dare not to neglect IE fully.

Issue 2: Local vs online

The ‘look and feel’ of my localhost XAMPP is not 100% the same with the Apache server of my host. So I have to now and then test it online.
Just recently I’ve found this lill’ usefull plugin: Theme Test Drive. Activating this plugin it will give you, logged in as a admin, the ability to activate another theme and see what the site actually will look like.
In the mean time the regular visitors will see the clever ‘under construction’ theme Launchpad.

Issue 3: Intense Debate is still giving me headaches

I just might have to dish it in the end after all. I’ve complained here why I chose for Intense Debate. The problem is that when ID is enabled it takes too long to count the number of comments: it has to retrieve data from the ID-server for every post.

Gotta go…and make some more fan-tas-tic progress.

As stated in my post Setting goals for 2009 I’ll try to post only about the projects I’m working on…from now on. And I have to admit it’s hard not to blog, rant or rave about anything else.
Because there is actually a lot to blog, rant and rave about. For example this blog now has reached a Pagerank of 2 in 3 months, but so did my sleeping site Uppedd.com, which never had any content at all…and this is a big mystery to me.

The first post of 2009 year is a ‘fan-tas-tic’ one. Well, actually it’s about one of my projects called ‘Fan-tas-tic’ and a although the name may suggest otherwise it’s actually a quite humble project: a ‘fan-tas-tic gallery’ powered by WordPress.

Yes, I am aware that there are already hundreds of (CSS) galleries (like these lists of examples: 36 + 74 + 115) and a lot of free WordPress themes to make your own. However they all lack some essential features for the visitors and for the administrator.
I’ll come back to these features in another post, when I’ve got the full feature list of my own gallery complete.

In the mean time you should also check out some of the galleries above for inspiration and figure out which features you think they lack and leave a comment. If I can, I might just implement it in my ‘Fan-tas-tic Gallery’ theme.

To actually get nominated I need the help of other Unstandard theme lovers: I need a minimum of 5 comments, which is actually harder to achieve than it seems at first site.

So if you’re also using the Unstandard theme from 5thirtyone , please leave a comment on this post if you think this blog and the Unstandard theme should make a chance with this competition.

Off course any other and even sceptic comments are, like always, also welcome.

Related post(s):

• The Unstandard theme: widgetized and gravatar-ized

The minute I came across the unstandard theme I knew it was the perfect theme for what I had in mind for Aytemir.com.

However I found out that it lacked a bunch of essentials features, which I missed dearly. And although there are some snippets in the comments and the forum they’re just not complete or they didn’t work for me: hence The Unstandard theme version 2, which adds the following extra’s on the already excellent theme:
-Text replaced with a logo
-Sidebar widgetized, with correct CSS layout
-Footer widgetized, with correct CSS layout
-Gravatar in comments

Live demo: You’re looking at!
Download: The Unstandard theme version 2.0!

Note: all copyrights, licence and credits concerning both versions are still a property of Derek Punsalan/5thirtyone.com.
The Unstandard v2.0 theme is distributed as is: You’re advised to install and test it locally (with XAMPP or WAMP) first and backup your originals.

It’ll probably work ‘out of the box’: I’m using it locally and live with WordPress version 2.6.2. Please leave a comment if you’re having troubles with it.

UPDATE: Manually upgrade

If you’re already using the original Unstandard theme and you’ve already hacked it a bit than you might consider following these steps to ‘upgrade’ it manually to version 2.0:

1.Gravatarize

Somewhere around line 32 in comments.php after

<div class="fix">
				<div class="author_meta">

add the following

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar($comment, '75','http://www.aytemir.com/wp-content/themes/unstandard/images/default_avatar.png'); } ?>
<br/>

BONUS: the last parameter is not required. It only replaces the default WordPress avatar (mystery man) with your own default avatar!
BONUS: you might also consider reversing the comment order by displaying the last post at the top. Just add the following

<?php foreach (array_reverse($comments) as $comment) : ?>

just after this line

<ol class="commentslist">

2a.Widgetize sidebar

First copy functions.php to your themes root: copy this file from the above zip-package!
And in your sidebar.php add the following code, where you want your sidebar widget to appear

<ul class="sidebar-ul">
  <?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
  <?php endif; ?>
</ul>

2b.Widgetize footer

Edit your footer.php and add the following code, where you want your footer widgets to appear (in my case/Aytermir.com right at the top)

<ul class="sidebar-ul">
<div id="subfooter">

<div class="widget"><div class="inner">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar("subfooterleft") ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div></div>

<div class="widget"><div class="inner">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar("subfootercenter") ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div></div>

<div class="widget"><div class="inner">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar("subfooterright") ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div></div>

</div>
</ul>

And adjust the CSS style.css by adding the following at the bottom

/* highlight author comments*/
.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

/* widgetizing the footer */
#subfooter {
width:960px;
margin-left:0px;
margin-right:0px;
height:300px;
clear:both;
}

#subfooter .widget {
width:310px;
float:left;
margin-left:0px;
margin-right:10px;
}

#subfooter .widget .inner {
padding:0px;
}

BONUS: the first part will highlight the author comments!

3.Logo instead of title text

While your busy why not replace the title of your blog with a cool logo Don’t forget to replace my URL’s with your own! Just edit your header.php

<a href="http://www.uppedd.com"><img src="http://uppedd.com/wp-content/themes/unstandard/images/logo.png"></a>

just after

<div id="leaderboard" class="fix">

BONUS: Why not add a favicon while your busy hacking? Just add the following in your header

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

Add it just after the < head > tag and upload your favicon.ico in your theme root.

UPDATE 2: Fixing the Recent Comments

Get this widget: Widget for Simple Recent Comments, although the default one is fine too, this one can be tweaked more.
Alter line 100 according to the following.

$output .= "\n\t<li><a href=\"" . get_permalink($comment->ID) . "#comment-" . $comment->comment_ID  . "\" title=\"on " . apply_filters('the_title_rss', $comment->post_title) . "\">" . $comment->comment_author . ": ''" . strip_tags($comment->com_excerpt) . $dots . "''</a></li>";

That should do the trick!

UPDATE 3: An Unstandard Pagination

Wanna add pagination in your Unstandard theme homepage? Just follow these installation tips at Adding Nice WordPress Pagination.
And find in your home.php

<?php query_posts('showposts=9'); ?>

and change it into

<?php query_posts(); ?>

And don’t forget to adjust in your Settings > Reading > Blog pages show at most the desired number of posts to show. For example 9.