I’m releasing another WordPress theme, Upstart Blogger Modio, now compatible with WordPress 2.3. In keeping with my other WordPress themes, this theme is designed to be:
- Minimalist: Very clean, spacious and easy to read.
- Fast: Lightweight, for speed.
- Ad-friendly: The columns are sized specifically to accept standard ad formats.
- Easy to install: You can install without plugins, though four plugins are recommended and included.
- Easy to use: Includes a CSS rollover side menu or can be used with a widgetized side menu.
- Flexible: Includes an optional home page.
Here’s a preview (click to enlarge):
You can also view the demo.
Download
You can download the theme, Upstart Blogger Modio, by clicking here.
Be sure to subscribe to Upstart Blogger to be notified of updates!
Instructions
- Open the UpstartBloggerModio folder, then upload the ub_modio folder to your WordPress theme folder.
- Open the Plugins folder inside the UpstartBloggerModio folder. Open the contents to your WordPress plugins folder. Read the readme files for installation instructions.
- To select the theme, go to the Presentations tab of your WordPress admin and select Upstart Blogger Modio.
Plugins
Four plugins are recommended and are included. Here are the links, if you want to check that you have the latest versions:
Notes
- The home page is optional. If you’d rather not use this, just rename or delete home.php.
- You should set the Popularity plugin to not display popularity of posts. It’s used just to create a list of featured posts. See the plugin readme for instructions.
- You may use either the CSS rollover menu as your sidebar or, if you have widgets turned on, the dynamic (but static) sidebar. The CSS rollover menu is fixed so it will not scroll with the window. Because of this, you should be careful about adding content which could make this menu too long to be visible in small browser windows.
- There’s a DIGG button which does not require any plugins. If you’d rather not include it you can open single.php and delete:
License
This WordPress theme is released under the Creative Commons Attribution v3.0, meaning you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, but you should (please) keep the link back to Upstart Blogger, either in the sidebar or the footer. See the README for details.
History
0.1 First released 05.14.07.
0.2 Updated 05.29.07. Changes:
- Edited the footer to automatically assign copyright to the blog title.
- Fixed the sidebar so it should work properly with widgets in WordPress 2.2.
- Fixed the sidebar so a static sidebar appears when viewed in IE6.
- Fixed the comment bubble so it displays properly when the cite wraps to more than one line.
- Fixed the footer alignment problem (at least, I’ve got my fingers crossed).
- Removed unused #dynamic_sidebar selectors from the CSS file (I just left these in by mistake in the first version).
0.3 This is just an update to add tags to the meta information for individual posts, making it compatible with WordPress 2.3. The rollover menu should now work in IE7 (but not IE6, which doesn’t support this feature).
0.4 Updated 10.09.07. This fixes archive.php so tag archives display properly.
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69 Comments
Looks great Richard. I’m loving the space of the theme. Feels like a drive through the Midwest. I’m not a big fan of clutter so this is refreshing. Yet another great theme.
Thanks, Andy. We seem to share a fondness for spacious layouts. Your new theme, The Tao of You, is looking very nice as well.
Oh, sorry. It’s Robert, Amos. :)
Opps, I meant Robert, really I did :). I have a character named Richard in one of my novel drafts. The constant embarrassment of having a hundred people in my head, and being absent minded. Runs in the family too. My mom still calls me Levi, my nephew, Rick, my uncle, and Howard, my other uncle, occasionally she’ll call me by the name she gave me.
I’m curious about this home.php idea you got too. Love to see what you come up with if you run with it.
No problem. I have a brother named Richard and for some reason, if people aren’t going to call me by my real name, they seem to go for that one.
So, this novel you’re writing… Do you know about NaNoWriMo? I did it two years ago and it was great fun.
Yeah, I was just thinking about designing home pages that could be dropped in to any theme, so you could have variety in your blog without having to redesign everything or switch themes all the time. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but then I saw your post about how you’re using parts designed by others and now I’m looking at it more seriously.
Awesome looking theme.
clean looking theme, but i can’t download it. the file’s gone. and it does not display properly in IE 6.
prec, I’ve fixed the broken link for the download.
I’ve heard that there are problems with the side menu in IE6, but I have no way of testing this. If someone can help me troubleshoot this, that would be great. If you have a lot of IE6 users, you may want to disable the rollover sidebar menu until I can find a fix.
Great theme!
Great theme! I have found two problems so far though: #1 the footer is not directly underneath the post (especially when changing the window width) and #2 a “]” bracket sits on the front page somewhere under “recent posts” and another “[” will appear when I hover over the recent post.
(tested with Firefox and a fresh install of WP 2.2)
03, the footer alignment is a problem only at smaller screen sizes. I still don’t have a fix for it, but I’ve added this to the known issues.
Regarding the bracket, I would need to see you web site as I don’t see that here.
Hmm I’m on 1680×1050 ;) and the footer doesn’t align like the rest does. I have quickly looked at the css but did not spot anything, it seems to work here though. I will look at it again tomorrow and let you know about that bracket thing as well.
03, that is interesting. I’ve only seen the footer problem when I go below 1024, but obviously something else is going on.
As far as the bracket thing, I haven’t heard of that before so please let me know what you find out. Thanks.
Did you get my mail about this?
03, I replied to your email. If you didn’t get the message, here it is again:
The rollover effect on the home page is a little finicky. It won’t work with the Popularity: n% turned on, which is the cause of the bracket thing. You can turn it off like this:
——–
How do I disable showing ‘Popularity: n%’ on my posts?
For this, you need to edit the Popularity Contest plugin .php file. Just change this:
@define(’AKPC_SHOWPOP’, 1);
to this:
@define(’AKPC_SHOWPOP’, 0);
If you don’t want to edit the .php file, you can add this to your WordPress index.php file:
@define(’AKPC_SHOWPOP’, 0);
You can also set this on a conditional basis via your own plugin by accessing the ‘akpc_display_popularity’ hook.
———
As far as the related posts plug, this is working fine on my blog and I’m using 2.2. I would double check that it is installed correctly. Make sure you run the SQL Index Table Setup in the Plugins/Related Posts Options of your WP Admin.
The footer is still a known problem. It works in Safari and Firefox at most sizes on my computer, but breaks down at smaller sizes. I spent a lot of time trying to fix this once and gave up frustrated. When I find the time I’ll give it another go.
The sidebar should definitely work in all but IE6. I don’t have IE6, so I can’t troubleshoot it. If you have any information, that would be great. Otherwise, I would try reinstalling Modio. I’m not aware of any other problems with it.
I haven’t seen the comments glitch. Can you tell me a page on my blog where it appears?
Thanks and I hope this helps!
03, I found the fix for the comments balloon glitch. Until I make an updated version of the theme, you can edit the style.css file. Find the tag for the tag for div.bubble cite
and change it to this:
div.bubble cite {position: relative;
margin: -7px;
padding: 7px 0px 10px 15px;
top: 5px;
background: transparent url('images/tip.gif') no-repeat 20px 0;
font-style: normal;
font-size: 1.2em;
display: block;
}
i loooove this theme! so simple and very well graphically executed as well.
i managed to make small ammendments to the side bar code and that seems to work well with what i want it to do…
- though, i have a quick question:
how do i get the post title and the actually text to be smaller?
- also, i want it to post the entire message and no limit it to 5 lines and do the […] thing
in this a matter of modifying the index php file or the CSS style one… any pointers would be much appreciated… thanks, all.
Thanks, Vijay!
To make the text smaller, you’d change the style.css file. I’m not exactly sure what fonts you want to change, but just look for the font-size property. I think all of the fonts are in em sizes. If you want to change the post, look for the .post selector. Be careful about making it too small, though. Fonts are displayed differently by different browsers; it’s pretty small in Safari already.
To display the entire message, you want to replace this:
< ?php the_excerpt_reloaded(15, '', 'excerpt', FALSE, '[more]', FALSE, 1, TRUE); ?>with this:
< ?php the_content(); ?>great, thanks a lot robert…
> will post a link back when im done customising the theme….
I love this template. Very clean and simple.
Although, I’m not using the home.php so index.php is what people see when they visit my blog. I’m wondering what tags can I add to the index.php page so that it can display the entire content of my (one) latest post with a list of the title of the next few posts.
Thanks!
Sophie, if you don’t want to use the home page, find this line in index.php:
< ?php the_excerpt_reloaded(15, '', 'excerpt', FALSE, '[more]', FALSE, 1, TRUE); ?>and change it to this:
< ?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>To add a list of titles of recent posts, add this:
< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>< ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
< ?php endwhile; ?>
I’m using your theme on a new version of my site but unfortunately the menu isn’t appearing on IE 7, even with your ie.css addition. To see it on my site: http://ww.manicbyte.com (drop one ‘w’ from the URL)
Johanan, it should definitely work in IE7. It looks like you’ve done some editing there. Is is possible you changed something? Does it work if you do a clean install of the theme after backing up the modified version?
Dear Rob,
I had a more experienced friend help me out and he solved the problem. The site’s now up (more or less). Thank you so much for Modio, I never considered using someone else’s design until I saw how well put together yours was. Perfectly minimal. Stop by this incarnation some time:
http://www.manicbyte.com
Best,
- Johanan
Johanan, glad to see things are working. Your mod looks great. And thanks for the kind words on your blog.
Is there a way of fixing the menu tab (”Inside ?”) so that it scrolls with the rest of the page? The “div position”. Tried it out on iPhoney and because of the smaller resolution the menu gets mixed up with content.
Jennie, if you find this code in your style.css file:
#sidebar {position: fixed;
and change position: fixed; to position: absolute;, the sidebar should scroll. But I looked at my demo site in iPhoney and everything looked fine to me.
On my blog, www.kunochan.com the rollover sidebar is not working in IE. It’s fine in FF. I tried the above fix (editing index.php), but it did not work.
Is there anything else I can try? Thanks for your help! (I love the theme!)
Erik, I’m sorry you’re having problems with the theme. I was sure this was working, but I see it’s broken even on my demo site.
Just got back from WordCamp and I’ve got some catching up to do, but I’ll try to get a fix in the next few days. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
Erik, I’m not sure why the theme stopped working in IE, but here’s a quick fix. Open style.css, find this:
#sidebar:hover {left: 0px;
}
and change it to this:
#sidebar:hover {left: 0px;
cursor: pointer;
}
That works for me.
thanks for the cool design. my friends love playing with the sidebar! :)
Whoa! You’re welcome! I love what you’ve done with Modio. Nice job.
Hi, I just installed your theme (see www.kuult.de) and started to translate it into German. I want to change the colors of the “inside”-bar and the link colors, but the changes I made in the stylesheet.css didn’t work. Can you help me?
Very interesting theme - and I found the color-coding I was looking for.
Any idea what’s going on here?
# RELATED / YOU MIGHT FIND THESE INTERESTING
WordPress database error: [Can’t find FULLTEXT index matching the column list]
SELECT ID, post_title, post_content,MATCH (post_name, post_content) AGAINST (’there is no such thing as a violent video game’) AS score FROM wp_posts WHERE MATCH (post_name, post_content) AGAINST (’there is no such thing as a violent video game’) AND post_date
@Erik: The problem is that you haven’t configured the Related Posts plugin. Go to Plugins > Related Posts Options in your WP Admin and run the SQL Index Table Setup script.
That fixed it! Thanks again!
I’ve downloaded everything, but didn’t see a plugin folder with Modio? If you go to my site, it’s blank. Hmmmm.
I love the sublimity of this theme.
@Tim: Everything looks to be working. What did you do to fix it?
We have just launched a new tabbed menu theme
http://www.1.com.my/wordpress-theme/banteay-srey
Feel free to suggest improvement :)
Thanks for a very nice theme.
I´m building a new site for my company and I´m just trying out a couple of things. I have got in to a problem useing Lightbox in your theme. Do you or somebody have a suggestion for a workaround?
Here´s where I have tryied it out: http://foryoureyestruly.com/wordpress/archives/19
Thanks a lot :)
Hi, I am testing Modio and do like it a lot so far. Thanks! There seems to be a weird bug though in Firefox 2.0.0.7 for mac which I couldn’t detect on any other browser. The text-area for comments does not display localised (in my case, Cyrillic) characters correctly, as you type them in. Once posted, the comment is OK in the main area. Also, other input fields (name, email) are fine. In some other browsers, Cyrillic characters are displayed but the font changes (from what seems to be Helvetica throughout) to Times…
@ernst: I just looked at your site and Lightbox seems to be working. I do know that it seems to conflict with the Share This plugin, so if you (or anyone else) use it, you’ll probably run into problems. You do seem to have a problem with the footer, though. Check to see you haven’t accidently deleted a closing tag somewhere.
@Alex: I’m sorry you’re having problems, but I don’t have a way of troubleshooting it. I don’t have any idea why you’d be having these problems. Anyone else have any ideas?
Thanks anyway. BTW, it is exactly the same thing with this theme on this site. If this helps, this strange bug is also present with the Sandbox theme, I’ve just tried; but does not appear in any of the other themes (say, Hemingway, to give an example)
And another funny thing I’ve just noticed. On this site, as you type in Cyrillic, you get weird characters in the input area, but in the preview below eveything appears just fine.
Thanks for the quick reply. I think it´s a bug with firefox, because it works fine in safari. But here is how it looks in my browser: http://ernst.foyn.googlepages.com/Picture1.jpg
I just wanted to add that your themes are the best I have seen .
@Alex: VERY strange. Thanks for the heads up. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.
@ernst: I only looked at it in Safari. But I can’t think of any reason why the theme would be causing the problem. I notice you have some CSS in your header (gsc, etc.). Could this have something to do with your problem? I’d suggest installing Firebug and the Web Developer tools in Firefox and see if you can troubleshoot the problem that way.
Hey Robert-
Just switched over to this theme and I am loving it. I’m only starting to modify it and I already ran into a problem I can’t seem to figure out: I added Categories to my sidebar, but I can’t seem to get the actual categories themselves to align to the right with the rest of the sidebar. Please tell me I am stupid and there is an easy way to fix it? :-) You can check it out here.
Let me know… Thanks!
Tried it today and adored it. Howeveer, there were some strange questions:
1>. the inside sidebar does not work for IE.
2>. I tried to change the color theme. But for the backgroud color of inside bar, IE won’t show any change while in Opera/FF it’s orange.
Thanks~
@Norman: I looked at your site and it looks like you’ve figured this out. Let me know if you still need help.
@DQ: The dynamic sidebar is not compatible with IE. I don’t know why you would have a problem with the background color. But I looked at your site and it looks great in Safari!
Hey Robert-
I managed to get the categories to align right just after I posted this, but I can’t seem to figure out why the line-height differs between the first set of links (content/pages) and the second that I added (archive/categories). Is there something on the stylesheet that I’m not seeing?
Thanks!
@Norman: I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ll be updating the theme for WordPress 2.3 very soon and I’ll fix it in the update. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
@Norman: I looked at your page using Firefox and Firebug. You should be able to fix the problem with the categories by using this code for your list items:
Hi, Robert -
First let me say thanks a ton for the work you’ve done with this site. It’s inspiring.
I’ve got two questions that I would really appreciate some input on, if you have a moment. It would mean a lot.
First, how do you display post archives in Modio? I’m sure the answer to this is obvious but I’m having trouble figuring it out.
Second, what would I need to do to make the left sidebar static? I’m not 100% sure I want to do this but I wouldn’t mind experimenting with it.
Forgive me if these are too obvious, but I’m still a relative novice in the CSS/WordPress theme mod world. You’d be doing me a giant favor here.
Thanks and good luck with your post-UB future.
neal
@neal: To display archives, you have to create an archive page in your WP admin and select Archives as the page template. Archives should then show up in your list of pages.
CSS to make the sidebar static can be found in ie.css. It is static if someone is using IE 6. But if you want it static for everyone you can replace the CSS in style.css with the CSS in ie.css.
Thanks!
Hello,
I installed this theme yesterday and have changed it a bit to fit my needs. However, there is one thing I can’t figure out, and that is the search function. Searching from a widget works fine, but when I search from the archive page, I get thrown back to index.php.
Hi UB,
Great theme. I’m using it on my site with some little changes. It’s still needs some artwork on the side column.
Anyway just wanted to say thanks and keep up the great work.
Regards.
Absolutely love this theme. Still tweaking for my own site. My only wish is that the sidebar could hold more content. Long archive lists basically deplete the whole space.
Hi Robert, I’ve been using Modio for 7 months now, and I’m still totally in love with it. Yet, I’ve got this problem with categories that I wanna seek your advice. See, there are many posts in each category, but it only 3 posts out of all because I have set ‘3 posts’ at ‘option->reading->show at most’. Is there anything I could add/change to show all post of a category? Thanks!
Hi,
there seems to be something wrong with the result you see after clicking on the tagcloud. All the results end up aligned completely to the left, as a result the sidebar is covering these results. This is really a problem for IE users.
If looked at the the page source of both the homepage and de tagcloud results and what I’ve discovered is that is missing when the tagcloud results are displayed.
Normal page structure:
FRESH / LATEST POSTS
Tagcloud results page structure:
Now where do I fix this?
Oops, something went wrong there, this is the code that is not showing in my previous post. I’ve exchanged for ]
———-
I looked at the the page source of both the homepage and de tagcloud results and what I’ve discovered is that [ul class=”post”] is missing when the tagcloud results are displayed.
normal page:
[div id=”content”]
[ul class=”post”]
[li][b]VERS[/b] / LAATSTE PROJECTEN[/li]
[li id=”post-7″]
tagcloud result:
[div id=”content”][li id=”post-7″]
Thank you for this great theme! :-)
Would LOVE to see an update to the plugins that this requires. The theme rocks!!!
Robert:
Absolutely love the theme. Wish more of the web could be like it. One problem: In firefox, when trying to leave a comment, clicking on the ’speak’ button does nothing, which, I guess, if you have a comment to make, is a bit frustrating. Please advise. Thanks for your help and thanks again for making such awesome theme.
–Marc
http://2bars3stars.com/
Just wanted to congratulate you for a very ingenious theme design. It’s not very business oriented in my opinion (i’m working in this field) but the idea of a theme like this is totally cool.
So again congrats for this 1 and i’ll probably look under the hood of this one for a future theme of mine ;)
hey there, thy for this really fine theme. I got a question anyway. Where do I have to change what to fix the font size in an article? I don’t need the first lines to be bigger than the rest. Any help for me? :-)
It’s really a good theme. I’m now using it.I’ve translated it into chinese.I will pack it and provide a chinese edition download in a few days.
Hi - thanks for the great theme!
One question: I tried to understand a bit about CSS animations, as I thought it would be very nice if the sidebar would smoothly ’slide’ open and close, but I did not get this to work.
Do you happen to know how to do this?
Thanks!