Introducing Thirty Ten

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

WordPress 3.0 is introducing a new theme that is light years ahead of Kubrick (also known as default in the backend), that looks so good you won’t even mind running it on a live site. In addition to being a beautiful theme in it’s own right, it’s also easy to build upon and create your own child themes for. I’ll show you just how easy it is to make some substantial changes. We are going to move the two column Twenty Ten to a three column theme I’m going to call Thirty Ten. I’m going to lay out a couple of ground rules for myself when building this theme:

  1. I’m not allowed to override any of the template files with my own version. I want this to be as easy to maintain as possible.  This means that I have to use footer.php, header.php and all of the other files.
  2. No output buffers This means I can’t use an output buffer and then regular expressions to get around rule number one.
  3. I want the reader of this article to be able to take and borrow any piece of this theme and use it to modify there own theme.  Every part of this theme is licensed under the GNU public license, just like WordPress
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Version 1.1.4

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

I fixed a couple of bugs and have released a new version. If there are any more bugs, feel free to let me know. As always, the download link in the header is updated with the new version.

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Version 1.1.3

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

I just uploaded a small update to fix a bug with adding additional themes. I swear, this wasn’t intentional and I didn’t want to keep you from adding other themes :) . The download link in the header is updated with the new version.

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Version 1.1.2

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

I’ve just uploaded version 1.1.2 which makes use of the new edit_theme_options capability introduced in 14111.  You can see Ryan Boren’s post on wpdevel for information about the new capability.  The download link in the header has the updated theme.

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Three Columns, Three Ways

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

I was looking at a friend’s site that is running Thirty Ten and it got me thinking. If it was this easy to create a three column theme with the content in the center, why not one that had the content on the left? Or the content on the right?

And then I thought, why not just give the user the option. So that’s what I’ve done. You now have the option of having the content on the left:

On the right:

Or the default center:

This option can be managed from the Thirty Ten settings page. Now you might be asking why didn’t I add this under the appearance menu? Well I wanted to make use of the WordPress Settings Api like I did in my Hitting an External Cron Plugin.  You can download an updated version.  Most of the pertinent changes are in the new options.php file.  Happy Theming and let me know if there are any more changes you want to see.

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How Thirty Ten converts Twenty Ten to Three Columns

Posted on April 4, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

One of the biggest differences you’ll notice between Twenty Ten and Thirty Ten is that Thirty Ten has three columns.  This is incredibly easy to do by using some css that is already available in the Thematic theme along with a few quick fixes.  It enables us to take this:

And turn it into this:

The guide to creating Thirty Ten has a full explanation of how to do this along with all the other changes you see here.  You can also download Thirty Ten and take a look at the code yourself.

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Thirty Ten Default Headers

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Aaron Jorbin

In addition to the default headers available in Twenty Ten, Thirty Ten contains three photos from photographer Aaron Hockley of Hockley Photography. You can take a look at the three options below.

Take a look at Twenty Ten Child Theme Tutorial to learn how Thirty Ten was created, including how I included more default headers.

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