dBaines.com: Volume 4

I had some spare time this morning to try and nut out why the WP Theme Switcher and Zenphoto weren’t getting along.
Turns out it the cookie was only being created for /blog/ rather than the whole domain. After fixing that it works a peach.
Before figuring out it was the cookie, for some reason I was dead sure it was the variable $theme (both the theme switcher and zenphoto use $theme – gotta love devs who use generic variable names). In playing around with it I’ve accidently made it so that whatever theme you choose for WordPress, it requires the same theme for Zenphoto. This is even better because now I can make truely unique wordpress themes, and have a zenphoto theme that looks exactly the same.
Excellenté!

If you want to revert back to dBainesTHREE (or any of it’s various skins) simply choose it from the theme switcher on the left.
It should still work absolute fine. If you find an error or bug for either of these two themes please report it.
When I get time I will eventually bring over the skins from dBainesTHREE.

Read on for a run down of new features…

Breadcrumbs and Page Re-Ordering
I’ve re-ordered the pages and subpages to be more logical now. Each of the links at the “tabs” at the top are main pages. And if they have any subpages, they are available from the parent page. The “active” tab will stay active when viewing a sub-page.
I’ve tweaked the breadcrumb plugin a bit. I’ve prettied it up for searches, something that was actually suggested by Matthew-T when I was working on his WordPress Theme. I’ve emulated the breadcrumbs for the gallery.

Dynamic Sidebar
The sidebar changes depending on if you are viewing the Blog, a Page or the Art Gallery.
I find this a lot better for the gallery, as it cleans up the comments from being at the bottom, to replacing the redundant blog comments with the gallery comments. It also negates the purpose of the quickjump, by featuring the list of albums right there in the sidebar.
The RSS buttons don’t do anything though, simply because there is no RSS feature for ZenPhoto yet, but it is promised in the next version, so it should be in use by the next upgrade.

Title
A pretty low priority feature, but something that’s been iching away at me. In the previous version I made the title change to dBaines.com Art Gallery when viewing the gallery. After I made the breadcrumbs for the gallery I applied a much simpler version of (when there’s no hyperlinks to print it really cuts away at the code) it in to the title script.

Differing style of page for Index and Single
Index shows the more traditional blog style that I usually have, while Single shows a more profesional look. Straight to business, a bold, centred title followed by the post, with the meta gathered at the bottom.

New Gallery Look
I’ve changed the look of the gallery when viewing an image. I’ve matched it up to the rest of the layout, rather than have those ugly blocks.
Unfortunately IE6 likes to pull gaps out of it’s arse so there were monster spaces between the image navigation and the actual image container, and what’s worse, I couldn’t rectify it. So I’ve made a special IE design, that is to say that I’ve made it look like those ugly blocks again. Lucky for people using a decent browser, you get a neat new design.
As mentioned in the “Sidebar” section above, the latest comments as well as the quickjump (now in the form of a list of albums) have been moved to the sidebar.

PNGs
I’ve been getting lazy and using the PNGs straight out of the Silk Icon package. I’m going to convert these to GIFs so it looks just a tiny little bit better in IE6. After all, I still get quite a few hits from people using IE6.

More New Features

• Search Excerpts
• Search Pages
• Top Button – something that’s been missing for the past two versions for reasons unknown. Now it’s back!
• WP-PageNavi – Pages(X) 1,2,3 rather than «previous | next »
• Prettier About page
• Icons galore!