Andreas over at Tuts & Tipps has given us this excellent new Blog theme. Apart from the fact that it simply looks great it comes packed with jquery goodness, some gorgeous icons and let’s not forget to mention the new “Theme Variables” and “Widgets” tabs so that you can easily tailor it to your needs.

Here’s a great blog theme from the WooThemes team. This has been ported in a manner specifically intended to be easy to install for people new to Textpattern. It is a method that I intend to continue with and I hope that it becomes a “standard”. Installation uses Manfre’s “mem_templates”: plugin to import all page, form and CSS templates plus it installs all plugins used by the theme and activates them.

No images need to be uploaded to the “Images” tab. That tab is for content and theme images are not content nor are any script files uploaded to the “Files” tab for the same reason. All aspects of the theme remain external to Textpattern itself.

There are 2 new plugins included – “woo_variables” and “woo_widgets”. Once installed you will find that you have 2 new tabs – “Content/Theme Variables” and “Contact/Widgets” – both of which enable you to modify the setup of the theme without the need to go anywhere near any code. These 2 plugins are highly modified versions of Adi Gilbert’s adi_variables plugin. Modifications have been made in such a way as to allow them to sit alongside each other plus you still have the option to install Adi’s original plugin if need be without fear of conflict. The “woo” versions are not available publicly as they are specifically tailored to the theme they came bundled with. My thanks to Adi for producing his plugin in the first place. I hope he doesn’t mind what I’ve done to it.

The theme comes with extensive documentation, though I say it myself, probably the best theme documentation anywhere. Here are some details about Bueno:-

• Comes with 7 colour variations which can be set on the new “Theme Variables” tab.
• The header can use your own logo image or, if you don’t have one, it will display the site name entered into the “Preferences/Basic” tab. These settings are on the new “Theme Variables” tab.
• By default the theme uses the “articles” section for the Blog but this can be changed on the “Sections” tab and the new section entered on the new “Theme Variables” tab. This will then be used throughout the site including widgets, navigation and sitemap.
• Feeds use Txp tags by default but if you have a Feedburner account the URL can be entered on the new “Theme Variables” tab and this will be used instead.
• The email address for the contact form is added on the new “Theme Variables” tab.
• All widget variables, including ad images, are on the new “Widgets” tab.
• All widgets can be placed in both the footer and the sidebar, or both if necessary (except Twitter which can only appear on a page once due to the way the API works).
• The extended footer can be left blank.
• The main weblog images at the top of the articles are entered into the “Article Image” field in “Advanced Options” on the “Write” tab. Just need the “id” number. If you don’t want an article image the theme can cope with it.
• Article image thumbnails are not required (unless you want them for something else) as the original image will be auto-resized for the “Featured Posts” widget.
• Styling is included for images contained within an article to position them left, right or centre. Just add the appropriate class name to your image tag.
• The Contact form will be automatically added to the bottom of the Contact article once it has been created.
• The Sitemap form will be automatically added to the bottom of the Sitemap article once it has been created.
• The new “mem_templates” plugin needs to be installed manually but once that is done all page templates, form templates, CSS templates and remaining plugins are imported with a couple of “clicks” plus all plugins are “activated”.
• A full-width page template is included.
• An error_503 page template is included.

Even if you don’t require a theme I would be grateful if you just tried it out. There is a post in the Development blog relating to theme installation and I would be very interested in any thoughts/ideas.

Tsky is an elegant, clean template for Textpattern developed without any plug-ins. It is a port of the original Tarski theme for WordPress. The template uses a lot of the new TXP tags added in the 4.0.8 release and probably won’t work with earlier versions.

The 2.0 version is the first public release. See my site above for future releases and for any comments or requests. In the 3.0 release I intend to add more feature such as SEO.

The template was inspired by an image I have recently taken on a trip around Australia. I have developed the template without installing any plug-ins to make sure this template is an easy start for the beginner Textpattern user but it is also very easy to customize for the experienced user. The template has been developed on Textpattern 4.0.8 but it will work on previous versions as well as it is not using any of the most recent TXP tags to keep things easy.

For any questions please contact me on my website (see above).