SevaTeem

Adsense is eventually going to be an integral part of the SevaTeem theme and something that will be supported by the options page in due course (coming soon). However, since the number of hits on the site is rather higher than I was expecting I thought that I’d pop them in as a quick-fix for now which meant a small edit to the archives, index, page and single.php files along with the addition of google_horizontal.php.

All being well, the first version of the options screen will be making its appearance over the weekend and will initially support the selectable background image, the text colours and the first adsense options.

One key aspect of writing a new theme is testing it, and that’s what I’ve been doing over the last month or so by rolling SevaTeem out to various blogs.

I started off with a very plain-vanilla version over at Personally Chosen. Actually, it’s so plain that I’ve not yet seen a Wordpress theme released with anything like that particular look. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.

Somewhat closer to the original idea is that over at Our Inns. By this time, I was getting quite adventurous and tried out a dark background on A Time of Magic. As it turns out, that has highlighted one particular feature that I’d like to add to SevaTeem which is the ability to select the colour of the text as an option in the theme rather than requiring edits to the style sheet.

One thing that these show is that the theme is workable as-is. There are some quirks that need to be ironed out but it’s good enough for me to actually use at the moment.

Anyway, all being well, I’ll be adding a few more features to SevaTeem over the weekend.

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.