One of those is the colour of links which, up to now, have just disappeared into the background. So, for example, on The View from Arnold, the links such as they are aren’t visible unless you hover over them.

Anyway, that’s one of several little niggling things which I’m in the process of sorting out.

Which gets me back to the point where I was working my way through the stylesheet and tidying it up…

Now I’ve reached the point where it does matter as you can see, or at least it matters when I use fixed width columns on a fluid width page. Essentially this means that I need to add in styles for each of them in the stylesheet so that I can update sidebarRight1, 2 and 3 to allow for the times when they’re empty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You add the includes for the three sidebar PHP files into the usual files (ie archive.php, index.php, page.php, search.php and single.php), create the three new sidebars in functions.php and you’re away.

That does actually work as you can see. However, there are a couple of problems which it creates. First, we have the main text running right over the dress but more importantly any empty sidebars on the lefthand side still take up space.

In fact, at the moment empty sidebars on the right also take up space but you don’t notice that as the space used is off the side of your screen but in the case of those on the left the empty space moves the main text over to the right. I’ve cheated a little in that we renamed SidebarRight1.php (the original Kubrick sidebar) as SidebarLeft1.php so that when I removed all the content from the first right hand sidebar, there wasn’t the usual default content that the Kubrick theme provides.

You’re probably thinking that I could just set the width of the left sidebars to “auto” and the problem would go away. That works to some extent but “auto” sets the width of the column to the size required by the longest string of text so it would work if the content was just the Meta stuff but doesn’t work if it’s, say, the recent posts. Also, there’s the problem of the margin: even though there is currently no content in the left sidebars, that margin is enough to shift the blog text over to the right.

To fix that problem what’s needed is to make a small change to sidebarLeft1, 2 and 3 and corresponding changes in the stylesheet to allow for a zero margin and zero width sidebar when there’s no content. You could make the same changes in the sidebarRight1, 2 and 3 but that’s not necessary as empty right hand sidebars don’t affect the layout of this theme (yet).