Thanks again go to Tai for his translation of the second part of the Theme Guide series into Japanese. Great work!
Also, Simos Xenitellis has produced a Greek localization for the Giraffe theme. You'll need the .mo file for the theme, and the .mo file for WordPress (taken from this Greek translation website and converted into a .mo file). Check it out from the Localization menu in the sidebar of this website, or visit his website for the full effect. Thanks Simos!
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You may have noticed a small drop-down menu labelled 'Localization' in the sidebar of this blog. It's something I've been playing about with since localizing the Giraffe theme and, while it doesn't magically translate the entire blog, it does provide a viewer with a simple method to change the locale.
But what is a locale? In WordPress terms it refers to the framework around which your posts are displayed. That is, the words, phrases, dates, and times, that surround your posts.
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I've added a small Pinyin converter to the InScript plugin. Pinyin is a method of transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. As Chinese is a tonal language, it is important that these tones are included in the pinyin. This is achieved through the use of accents and other marks over certain vowels.
The reason for the converter is that these accents are not easy to type, especially for people with keyboards in an accent-less language (i.e. English). It is possible to enter the characters using some form of character mapping tool, or by entering the HTML code directly, but this is not an intuitive method.
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A big thanks to Stefano Aglietti and Mario Núñez Molina for providing localizations of the Giraffe theme in Italian and Spanish. I've added a small localization selector in the sidebar so that people can change the theme language and see what it looks like. It doesn't translate the posts, but it provides dates and other phrases in the chosen language, making for a better experience for non-English speakers.
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My Giraffe theme has now been updated. I've made some pretty major changes and these are summarised below:
- The theme is fully localised! I don't have any translations yet, but once I release the relevant parts then hopefully people can translate the theme into their own language - no more hacking the theme to bits.
- Administrator interface. The support plugin now adds it's own interface into the administration section. From here you can configure many aspects of theme's appearance, such as colour scheme. More details in the themes section.
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After the (almost) complete restoration of my system I can now get back to finishing off the things I was working on. The result of this is I've now made the theme for this website available for download.
I've tried to tidy it up as much as possible, although it's still not perfect. There is also one small issue with Firefox 1.0.4. Sometimes, on a wide screen (1400 pixels on mine), FireFox will incorrectly add a 1 pixel gap between a border in the comments section. I'm not sure what the cause of this is, and it only occurs on FireFox - all other browsers display it perfectly. I know it's a browser inconsistency because resizing the screen causes the gap to disappear. Until I can figure out a fix, or if anyone else knows the reason, then I will put it down as an acceptable problem that will hopefully disappear in the next FireFox release.
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So after all the articles about creating themes I finally got round to finishing my own. After much pulling of hair I also made it work in Internet Explorer. Really, the pain that browser puts people through is unreal. Roll on IE7.
Anyway, I've tried to rearrange the layout so as to make it not look like Kubrick. The front page has a full-width lead article, followed by three smaller articles, and finished off with a list of titles. A single page post uses the full-width of the page. This was all designed to give maximum space for long articles. The CSS is also print-friendly.
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A lot of people have asked for a printable version of my WordPress theme dissection and so I've been beavering away and have now released a PDF. This has been fully revised and expanded, and weighs-in at just over 1MB.
In a further fit of productivity I've also made a version available to buy from the online publisher Lulu. The guide is the same, so you can download the PDF and print it out yourself, but you also have the option of ordering a professionally printed and bound copy. As more of an incentive, the Lulu version has an extra chapter including my guide to installing WordPress on your own computer, as well as extra bookish things such as content pages etc. There's also a full-colour durable cover - just like a real book!
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We generally become WordPress users to create a blog for everyone to see. This can involve the purchasing of a domain name and web hosting. These we treat as black boxes on which the WordPress software is installed, and everything magically works. This is exactly how it should be.
Although WordPress provides a comprehensive management interface, there are times when it would be better to have our own local copy, running on our own machine. There are several reasons we would want to do this:
- A working backup of our online site
- A development site to develop plugins and themes without affecting our online site
- A testing area to try out hacks and new versions of WordPress without fear of corrupting the live site
- A staging area to create and verify posts, before releasing them live
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In previous guides we have concentrated on the building blocks of creating a WordPress theme. A basic design structure has been defined, followed by enclosing header and footer elements, and finished off with a navigational guide. While important aspects of any blog, they are secondary to its main purpose: the content.
In this fourth and final part we carefully dissect the process of taking the content from WordPress and arranging it on screen. Attention is paid to the many alternative methods of grouping this information, from the many posts of the front page to search results and archives.
We will look at how WordPress distributes the responsibility for this work, and how everything is tied together with the all-seeing all-knowing construct known as ‘The Loop’.
By the end of this guide we will not only have a fully working theme, but we should have enough experience and knowledge of WordPress to be able to extend our theme beyond the basic design presented here.
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