Template Monster Themes

Back in Feburary, I stumbled upon some free templates from Template monster. I made some comments here on this blog about how ironic I found it that they were table based. The irony was that one of the tables based designs were based on Cameron Moll’s design. The same Cameron Moll who expounds on the virtues of CSS and XHTML. I summed up with a snide comment, “get with the program”. Little did I know, that they came across my comment, and have indeed attempted to step up to the plate and make their WP designs CSS and XHTML based. Before I get into the details and observations about that aspect of things, a little more about the themes, and how I came about them.
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Shuttle

Broken Kode
Announced last week that Shuttle was “launched”, and subsequently the WP community was in a sea of posts recanting the “launch” of a new admin interface for WP. The truth of the matter is, there isn’t any code, from what I’ve read, purely some images, and some Photoshop files. There also seems to be mulitiple versions, and a split within the team that developed it. So the truth of the matter is yes, a lot of time and energy was put into mocking up a better interface, but much more work will be required before it truly is launched. I wouldn’t expect to see any of this in 2.1, and I’m not even sure what the roadmap looks like from there.

Image Replacement WordPress Plugin

Development on a Shoestring

Building on the Cold Forged’s Image Headline plugin, this plugin allows a tag to be marked for replacement, including tags specific to classes, thus not requiring the theme to be edited. All this is done through an options pane in admin panel. A nifty way to incorporate fonts that otherwise your viewer may not have, and well worth the look.

Oh, the Bitter Irony

Template Monster Blog » Blog Archive » Free WordPress Themes

How pathetic. Template Monster, testing the blog theme waters, is offering up 5 new themes free for download, the only caveat is a 5 question survey before downloading.
But here’s the kicker. One theme, is “inspired” by CSS Guru Cameron Moll, alas the design is in tables, TABLES!?!?
Point of suggestion Template Monster, get with the program.

Left Sidebars and Optimal Code

There’s much discussion regarding SEO (search engine optimization), which I’ll leave to those who want to “specialize” in it. I’ll trust the consensus, which makes sense, that content should come before sidebars, etc. Which can present a small dilemma when designing using CSS and PHP. While porting the X blog theme, I entered my first foray into this.
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