SevaTeem

One thing that always surprises me when I look at the themes available is that they offer next to no options to let people change how the header and/or general background images are handled.

I don’t think I’ve yet come across a theme that lets you easily change the background image and then get the text colours to something suitable without needing to edit the stylesheet. Until now that is because SevaTeem is designed to let you change the background and/or header images which in turn means that you’ll often need to change the colour of the fonts used so it has options to let you do that easily.

Similarly, sometimes you’d like a background image but with the text content completely over that with an opaque background. SevaTeem does all that and thus lets you create a number of very different looks very easily.

What’s left to do. Well, at the moment it seems to be just the dreary trudge through the stylesheet to get it tidied up a little. At the moment, it looks like that’ll be finished this week.

Although sometimes it felt like the day would never come, it looks like I’m getting close to the point when I’ll be releasing SevaTeem to the world.

The tidying up of various aspects is going pretty well and the initial set of options seems nearing completion too.

At the moment, you can select a header image and/or a main body image or you can go for plain colours on either one, you can get adsense to appear either before or after each post and you can add stats code to your pages. Of those, the only one that I’m not happy with is the last one as the code that sets the option keeps inserting extra backslashes; I’d like to get that fixed before releasing it.

I’m gradually working my way through the stylesheet which is expanding it a little bit as the various options are incorporated into it. Still to do is the gathering together of the stylesheet components for the sidebars which seem overcomplicated to me at the moment.

Finally, as you may have noticed, I’m also looking round for the definitive background image that’ll go out with the theme.

Although Kubrick comes with an options page, it’s a really complicated looking affair and doesn’t address the type of options that SevaTeem will be offering.

Fortunately, a couple of people have done sterling work on easing the creation of options pages. The Undersigned blazed the trail in 2006 with a great tutorial as to how to go about creating options pages and Literal Barrage added more sophistication to the original design. I’ve taken aspect of both from them in creating the initial options page for SevaTeem.

As with Kubrick, the Literal Barrage version has more complexity than I need right now. Having said that, some of the bits which I deleted from it include support for version checking of the theme which I may end up adding back in later.

One thing that can cause confusing errors being reported is that the functions.php file can’t finish with a blank line. Since that file is used both for displaying the blog and in the admin you can get peculiar errors all over the place.

So, what about those options?

First up was the font colours: you can now choose the colour of the main text and that used in the sidebars from the options page. Implementing that requires moving all but the identifying information from the style.css file, putting it in style.php and then using the variables provided through the option page at the appropriate points ie replacing “color:black” by “color:<? echo SevaTeem_font_colour ?>”.

Next was the first of the adsense options. The horizontal block in the posts is controlled by the options page where you can also add your adsense publisher id.

I’ll be looking at making the width of the main page and sidebars an option next. That’s going to mean that I need to revisit the right sidebars to incorporate the code from the left ones.

It’s easy to get carried away with an options page so once I’ve the sidebars sorted out, I’m going to sit back and have a think about what really needs to go in there. While I’m doing that, I think a good run through style.php is in order as I’ve been chopping and changing it all over the place throughout the development of this theme and it’s in need of a tidy-up.