Typo gets blue (dabadi dabada)

Next release will come with a brand new theme called True Blue. True Blue is a simplified port of the theme I'm using on my own blog. It's a nice, clean, 2 columns blue theme coming with Twitter native support.

 

 

Hélène's Typographic is a great theme, but we needed something more casual. To quote Matijs' own words, the default theme should be one that anyone could start off using, no matter what their blog was about (like the Kubrick theme half the Wordpress blogs use).

Since True Blue is using its own helpers, you may need to restart your Typo installation to have it work after enabling. We're working on fixing this.

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Published on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:59
0 comments

Typo theme creation quick guide

Typo offers a very slick and evolved theming engine. It allows theme developpers to override every view of the application, or just add their own layout, stylesheet, and let Typo do the job.
Many themes at Typogarden have been developped long before our current theming engine was introduced, letting people believe you can’t create complicated themes for Typo. That is, indeed, wrong.

A Typo template is made a minima with 3 main files: 

    <li>The layout.</li>
<li>A CSS stylesheet.</li>
<li>An about file using markdown.</li>
<li>You can eventually add a screenshot, and some fancy pictures in your theme, but they are not mandatory.</li>

Browsing a Typo theme looks like:

themes 
      \_ my theme
                 \_ about.markdown
                 \_ images
                 \_ layouts
                           \_ default.html.erb
                 \_ preview.png
                 \_ stylesheets
                               \_ style.css

Your main file is in layouts/default.html.erb, which is your theme main template. This is a simple RHTML file in which you’ll call Typo main methods.

Your layout’s header

This is a standard HTML file header, along with some ruby calls. Nothing complicated at all here.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="fr">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
  <title><%= h(page_title) %></title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="fr" />

  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "/stylesheets/theme/style", :media => ‘all’ %>
  <%= page_header %>
</head>

There are some things you must pay attention to:

  • h(page_title) is the title of the current document. This is generated by Typo, and translation in supported languages is done when avaliable.
  • stylesheet_link_tag is where you call your CSS stylesheet. It will always be in /stylesheets/theme/. Some call it style.css, some application.css, but do whatever you want.
  • page_header withh display a page header generated by Typo. It will provide:
    • ICBM tag, for geo localization.
    • Your meta description.
    • Your meta keywods.
    • Your RSD.
    • URLs for both your RSS and Atom feeds, for automatic discovery.
    • Stylesheets used by Typo embedded plugins, so that you don’t have to care.
    • Google analytics tags, if provided.

Your layout’s body

Every div included here are not mandatory. You just need to care about the ruby calls.

<body>
<div id="header">
  <h1><a href="<%= this_blog.base_url %>"><%= this_blog.blog_name %></a></h1>
  <h2><%= this_blog.blog_subtitle %></h2>
</div>

<div id="page">
  <div id="content">
    <%= @content_for_layout %>
  </div>

  <div id="sidebar">
    <%= render :partial => ‘shared/search’ %>
    <%= render_sidebars %>
  </div>
</div>

</body>
</html>

The importants things are:

  • this_blog.base_url is your blog URL defined in your settings.
  • this_blog.name is your blog title, defined in your settings.
  • this_blog.blog_subtitle is your blog tagline, defined in your settings.
  • content_for_layout is the most important part of your layout. It renders the page main content according to what you’re browsing (articles, tags, categories…)
  • render_sidebars displays your sdebar made of Typo plugins.

Here you are. You can now build a standard Typo theme and profit form the great things Typo can provide. […]

Published on Sun, 21 Dec 2008 10:09
2 comments

Typo 5.0.4 beta is out

After 4 months of hard work, doubts and refactoring, Typo 5.0.3.98, aka Typo 5.0.4 beta is finaly out. As for any beta release, it was mostly done for testing purpose, and to let our happy translators do their job. So please, fill in bug reports when you find one, and don’t be shy, submit a patch along :-). All the features are not frozen yet, even though any addition will be minor.

So, what’s new there? Many things.

Multi roles, we did it

Multiple roles are finally here, thanks to the work of Davide D’Agostino and Cyril Mougel. You can now choose between Administrator and Publisher. Contributor may come soon, but this special profile needs some more development.

A new default theme

Typographic is a simple, clean theme made by Hélène from O2sources, a French company involved in free and open source projects. Typographic relies on lightness, simplicity, warm colors, and adapts your screen… up to a certain extent.

New default theme

Dirtylicious and Standard issue have been removed and are now hosted at Typogarden. If you want to keep using them, you’ll have to download them first.

A brand new admin

The admin has been rethought, lot of code has disappeared, and it’s now cleaner, lighter and easier to use.

We now have tag management, which we plan to improve with things like tag merging, or detection of too close tags. We also offer tag autocomplete in the publishing interface.

New Dashboard

The publishing interface has been rebuilt to be easier and clearer to use. We’ve dropped the live preview powered editor since it was really killing the server by sending continuous AJAX requests.

New default theme

The come back of the gem

The gem is back and working, which means Typo has never been easier to install. Just run

  # gem install typo
  # typo install /some/path

And you’re done. Typo is now running on a random port using sqlite database.

However, we don’t recommend this configuration for production use. Even though there are many ways to run a Rails application, we have chosen and support Passenger aka mod_rails with MySQL as the easiest and most reliable way to run Typo.[…]

Published on Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:26
1 comment

Poll : a new default theme for Typo 5.0

After last week Rails 2.0, Typo 5.0 is soon to be released. As this is a major change, we have decided to change the default theme and to let you decide what you want as a default theme.

Standard issue

standard issue

View Standard Issue in action.

Dirtylicious

dirtylicious

View Dirtylicious in action.

Abstract

Abstract

View Abstract in action.

Rambling Soul

Rambling soul

View Rambling Soul in action.

Nautica

Nautica

View Nautica in action.

[…]
Published on Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:39
3 comments

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