I love it when business and pleasure coincide. I had to look into styling widgets today for an upcoming project, and decided to use my Paper Trail theme as test material. Turns out the markup of widgets gives you surprisingly (frustratingly) little to work with in terms of CSS. Still I managed to get the widgets to look like I wanted them to, thus completing the theme.

Paper Trail is a two column layout with fancy Flash post and blog titles.

• It requires Flash and Javascript (although it doesn’t break completely if these are missing). If your blog targets mobile users (for instance), this is not the theme for you.
• This is my first theme where I’ve paid any real attention to widget styling. Third party widgets may not look as intended. Chances are they will.
• Thanks to Geoff Stearns, the use of flash will not affect search engine ranking.
• The Flash titles contain complex algorithms that change things like line breaks and font size in order to best accommodate your post’s titles. Let me know if they act up. Using very long words in titles might render them unreadable.
• I’ll not be releasing the source code for the Flash movies. Mostly because I’m afraid you’ll laugh at me for my poor coding skills, but also because I fear you’ll ask me to explain how they work.
• Paper Trail was built for WordPress version 2.3, and will spend most if it’s time looking for missing things like tags on older versions (and not actually work).
• Because of limitations in the way Flash handles dynamic text the theme supports basic Latin characters only. Sorry about that.

If you want to give it a try, you can download it here.

As of now, ‘m testing a new WordPress theme on this site. I haven’t decided on a title yet, and there’s tons of little stuff missing, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be releasing this one sometime this or next month. The most important thing to sort out is decent widget support. This was sorely lacking from some of my earlier themes, and instead of updating them I decided to dedicate the time to designing a new one altogether.

I wanted to use a white background to increase readability, and I’m using Flash movies to do some typography tricks that plain HTML doesn’t know yet. Other than that it’s a relatively simple theme that will be easy to modify by anyone who isn’t completely allergic to style sheets or HTML.

So, what do you think?

I’ve been getting a lot of email asking me whether I’m going to be updating my themes to work with the new WordPress version that was released a couple of weeks ago. The short answer is ‘yes’, but there’s a ‘but’. I’m writing this from a spyware-ridden PC in an internet cafe in Bali, Crete, where I’m on vacation with my family. I’ll be back home next week and I hope to find the time to work on a new version for my themes. I’ll post the new versions here of course. Please hang in there a little longer…

One of the things I like about releasing WordPress themes is seeing what people do with them. Some just take out the credit link, other change so much I barely recognize my original work. And that’s a good thing. I try and make my themes easy to modify and do not attach any kind of license (which I know to be stupid, but I haven’t had the time to read up on things like Creative Commons).

Anyway, I liked Nikko City’s version (image above) of my Positive Feeling theme so much I thought I’d share it. They didn’t even change all that much, but seeing my layout used to sell Japanese cooking equipment made my day.

Matt of bestwpthemes.com contacted me a couple of days ago to let me know he added my Tranquility themes to his list of best WP themes. It’s always nice when someone adds your work to any kind of shortlist. Thanks Matt.

I stumbled across a site using a slightly modified version of Brian Gardner’s Dropshadow theme today and when I looked up the original I found it to be even better. It’s impossible to track all new theme releases nowadays, but of the ones I know I think its the best theme currently available for WordPress. Kudos to Brian. Great job!

I received word just yet that Marcus of txp-templates.com has finished porting my Tranquility White theme to TextPattern. I think it looks smashing! Great job! Thanks Marcus.

Ever since I released my Tranquility and Tranquility White WordPress themes, I’ve been getting emails about the Flash file used in both themes. People like to customize their theme, and the supplied swf file is locked. This was done on purpose, as I consider it to be a finished piece of Flash art. I originally created it for my daughter Ruby when she was born, and I feel it should not be messed with.

However, keeping source code to yourself is not a very open source minded thing to do and I’ve learned a lot from looking at other people’s code. Which is why I decided to post the original fla file. Please be gentle with it.

Flower fla file

When I occasionally browse themes.wordpress.net it strikes me not only how many themes there are, but also how many of them are rather poor. Many of them lack a coherent colour scheme and offer poor usability. Smashing Magazine has gathered 83 of the best WordPress themes available. If you’ve just set op WordPress and are looking for the creme de la creme in WordPress design, this is the place to look. My personal favorite is Suble, but you can’t go wrong with any of these.

Too bad none of my themes made it in there, I guess I’ll have to try harder with future themes…

A while ago, Automattic introduced sidebar widgets, a plugin that lets you manager your site’s sidebar(s) through WordPress. Pretty nifty, but none of my themes supported it. I’ve been getting more and more email asking me to fix this. I had a bit of time on my hands today, so I did.. Check themes.wordpress.net for the updated versions of “Tranquility“, “Tranquility White” and “Positive Feeling“.