SevaTeem

Kubrick is a widget enabled theme which means that there are loads of optional things that we can include on the sidebar with no effort on our part and gives the theme user a whole lot of control over how the sidebar will look. That bit works automatically and we don’t need to change the code.

However, Kubrick also includes an options page which we will be changing substantially in due course. First off though we need to change everywhere it says “Kubrick” or “kubrick” to “SevaTeem” so that everything that used to work is included within the theme. That also means renaming the images from “kubrickxxx.jpg” to “SevaTeemxxx.jpg” although in practice we’ll not be bothering too much with them for a while as SevaTeem will be more limited than Kubrick in some respects in this area eg we’ll only be offering a choice of a full-screen background image and one that is the background to the header.

Making these changes doesn’t change how the theme looks but is step one of the real work in implementing the theme.

Before you get carried away writing in all kinds of options to a new theme, it’s as well to look at what options are already available through the use of various plugins.

For example, I was thinking of including the option of having social bookmarking links on the posts but, of course, that’s not necessary as the Sociable plugin does it already. Likewise, it’s not necessary to let people add a copyright message as that’s handled admirably by DDSig.

Certainly, before you start off adding loads of options to a theme it’s best to check what’s available already in the form of plugins. That’s not to say that you can’t add them in as optional components in your theme (I’ll probably buildin the functionality of DDSig for instance) but you wouldn’t want to be doing something like Sociable which obviously needs updated on a regular basis.

At first glance, this seems to be amongst the easier things that you can do.
All you need to do is to change the “width: 760″ to “width: 60%” and you’re done although it’s best to change the width of the sidebars to 20% too.

The problem is that we’re using a full page background image and the text now flows all over it. As you can see from the image here, the sidebar text is unreadable.

There are several ways to correct this:

1. change the image either by selecting a new one or manipulating the current one;
2. change the colour of the sidebar text;
3. put a solid background colour behind the sidebar; or
4. reduce the width of the main column.

For simplicity, we’re going to go for the last option at the moment and reduce the width from 60% to 40% which restores the look to that of the fixed width version.