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  • jarbenne 10:49 am on June 3, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: themes   

    Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes 

    If you think your blog needs a bit of a change, I’ve just uploaded 4 new themes to the Commons to give your site a bit of a refresh. You can go into Appearance/Themes and preview how the new themes would look on your site. If you want to see an example populated with content, here’s a few links to demo sites using the new themes over on wordpress.com:2015-06-03_10-46-50

    Gazette

    Afterlight

    Scrawl

    Satellite

    There are a few themes reaching the end of their life, and will need to be retired from the Commons theme repository. Specifically Chapters, Crisp, Editorial, Slanted are starting to look their age, and don’t meet our current code standards. If you are using those themes, I would head over to the Theme repository and try something new on for size.

     
  • jarbenne 10:23 pm on October 17, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: themes   

    New Themes 

    I’ve just enabled some new themes on the Commons. Themes are an important component on the Commons. They allow our authors to customize the platform on which they share their voices with the world. Our goal with the Commons is not just to create a safe and caring environment, but to also compete on the Web 2.0 stage, and provide a better blogging experience than you would find on other commercial blog platforms. Having a rich catalogue of themes in part of that vision.

    The chart below shows the theme usage on the network. A large number of sites are still sporting the default theme. This could be due to the fact that the default themes are quite nice (I was sporting the TwentyThirteen theme on my own site for the past few months, and we use a slightly customized version of that theme for the main Commons site), but I think there are a number of other users who perhaps don’t know, or haven’t explored, the Appearance menu in the dashboard in order to find a theme that suits their style and audience.

    I try to ensure that they themes we provide are as feature-rich as possible, allowing for colour and header customization,  custom menus, and sidebar widgets. That said, there are always some themes that we offer just because they look fantastic, despite lacking a feature or two.

    If you are still sporting one of the “twenty_____” themes, because you didn’t realize you had options, go and check out some of the new arrivals and put a fresh coat of paint on your blog.

     
    • jarbenne 10:28 pm on October 17, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Sidenote: I made that graph using a spreadsheet in Google Drive, populating the first column with the theme name, and the second column with the number of sites with that theme active. Then I used the Insert/Chart menu to create a chart. Once the chart was created, I clicked the Publish Chart button, which revealed an embed code I could place within the Text tab of a new blog post.

      This embedded chart will automatically change if I change the values within the spreadsheet in my Google Drive. Cool eh?

  • jarbenne 9:04 pm on June 11, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: CSS, customize, , themes   

    Image Widget and CSS Editing 

    Just to keep parity with features recently launched on the Edublogs.org blogging platform, I’ve added a new Image Widget which allows you to post an image in the sidebar of your blog.

    For the adventurous, I’ve also added the ability for you uber-customize your theme using Cascading Style Sheets . Check out http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS and http://www.w3schools.com/css/ to see some documentation of using CSS, or you can follow the Web Fundamentals course at Code Academy (you can join in right at the CSS portion at this link) 

     
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