SevaTeem

As you may have noticed, the content of the left sidebar has been displayed above the header for the last few posts.

That’s basically down to an attempt at laziness which didn’t work. I thought that I’d get away with adding the styling for the left sidebars in header.php but that left me with a copy of the sidebar above the header so I ended up having to put the optional styling in sidebarLeft1.php, sidebarLeft2.php and sidebarLeft3.php. At the moment there’s no need to add similar coding into the right-hand sidebars as they don’t affect the layout of the screen whether or not they have content.

The code required is really simple and basically amounts to setting margin-left to either 2% or 0 and the width to either 10% or 0 depending on whether or not the relevant sidebar has any content.

That’s the sidebars pretty much fully sorted out now although I might return to them later and make that 10% width a calculated one so that the body of the text plus all enabled sidebars add up to 100% of the screen.

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.