You didn’t notice, but I complete changed the way I look today.
No, it’s ok. I put hours, literal hours into looking this good, and you’ve said nothing about it. But that’s fine.
I just thought I would inject a little color into my day. A new, colorful outlook. So yes, it’s for me, not you. I probably spend too much time grooming anyway.
This design doesn’t look all that fascinating, but it’s a great leap forward in Habari’s design. This theme uses a few little extra things that won’t be generally available to themers until the release of the next Habari version. Let me talk about a few of the exciting bits that are a part of this theme.
I started out with using Yahoo’s CSS grid framework for layout. It’s nice to offload the CSS to someone else’s servers, and to have a kit that is just going to work. I don’t have to think overly much about column widths, just apply the class I want and the thing works for me. It’s nice and simple.
I added the Cufón javascript library for rendering custom fonts for my headers, which you might notice use a non-standard font. The technique is pretty simple and falls back pretty well.
The more fascinating aspects of this design include the new Habari area and block features. These are kind of like WordPress widgets and Drupal blocks, but significantly improved. All of the things I’ve ever hated about those other systems are corrected in this one, at least from the API end – the UI side is yet to be completed. Nonetheless, the components of Habari’s core that drive block output are complete enough to use in output rendering, which they are currently doing marvelously.
The only thing I wanted to do with this theme that I had yet to do was change the way the comment form was generated. If Habari could produce a form for new comments that was built using its FormUI class, then plugins could enhance that form (adding captcha, changing required fields, etc) without having to use crazy buffering or inserting hooks all over the form output. I was hoping this part would be done, but having the rest of the theme complete I didn’t want to wait, so I just used a standard comment form.
There are some other parts of the old theme missing that I will eventually bring back using blocks. But I want to get some of the UI stuff done for blocks first. Then these features will be accessible to anyone.
