ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web

The theme looks a lot like what you see here at ode-is-simple.com.

You can download the new version of the theme here.

Here's a little preview

If you'd like to a better (and more interactive) look at the new version of the theme, you can head over to the demo site. I've installed the newest version of the theme there.

So what's new?

As you might expect from the version numbers, it's essentially the same as the previous version (2.0.1). There were several minor issues I wanted to address and somehow I got sucked in - though there are other priorities.

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Like the '_fox_news' variant introduced a few days ago, this certainly isn't an entirely new theme.

In this case all I've done is move the sidebar to the left of the main content area. (That also required updating shifting some paddings and margins to agree with the new placement of the sidebar.)

That's it.

I'm absolutely sure this is something you could have done on your own. And that's exactly the point I'm trying to make with the logic theme. As I've said before, I always intended to provide a few different layouts, both so that people new to Ode have a few different layouts to choose from, and more importantly, to demonstrate just how malleable a simple theme like this can be.

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Well, calling it a new theme is probably taking it too far. logic_fox_news is a 3 column variant of Ode's default logic theme. (Based on the newest 2.0.1 version of logic.)

Download the logic_fox_news theme.

This is something I've wanted to do for a while. With logic I've tried to create a theme which is both easy to understand (i.e. simple) and easy to modify. To that end, I decided it would make sense to create a couple of alternative versions of the theme with slightly different layouts. The idea is that users can pick the layout the works best for them as a starting point.

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After working through a series of posts about themes, I quickly revisited the default theme (again). This isn't something I'll continue to do forever, but I don't think I've gotten it quite right up to this point. Who knows, maybe this time is it.

Download the new version of the theme.

There are a couple of good signs:

1. Each time I go through it I'm tempted to change less.

2. When I compare the new revision to the previous one, it's not always clear to me what was so wrong with the earlier version that I felt I had to change anything at all.

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I've been working on an update to the default logic theme. It's really not a big deal from a design/development point of view. In fact the theme is almost identical.

From the readme included with the theme:

The overarching goal of this update is to establish a baseline for the theme going forward. This should be considered 'THE' logic theme. It will be the basis of all future work.

The look of the theme in a browser, as well as the structure of the page, is essentially the same.

Take a look or download the theme

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I've posted about this before, so this is just a quick update to say that the 'reserved' theme is now available to download.

• Take a look at a preview.

  The theme validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict (which you can confirm with the W3C's markup validation service).

• If you like it, you can download it.

If you have any questions or comments, about the new theme or anything else releated to Ode, I invite you to participate in the forum, email me directly, or leave a comment.

Check out a preview of reserved at the ode themes demo site:

http://themes.ode-is-simple.com/weblog/index.reserved

Reserved is YA 2-column theme intended to serve as a middle ground between 'logic' and 'planet_a'. As such, it's slightly wider than logic and narrower than planet_a, w/ design queues from both.

New to this theme is the CSS and HTML required for 'navigation tiles'. Ultimately these tiles will be able to be used with breadcrumb navigation (with tiles generated automatically to reflect the path to the current page, or as static links to arbitrary resources (e.g. photo galleries, an about page, other sites).

Reserved is a work in progress. I'd expect it to be released in an early form in the next few days.

As always, comments and feedback are welcome. There is a category for discussing the new theme in the community forum. Also, feel free to email me directly if you prefer - rob [at] ode-is-simple.com.

Update: Changed the theme named from 'reserve' to 'reserved' (what I wanted to name it in the first place), which then required me to update the link to the preview in this post.

New version of logic (logic_mascot) the Ode 1.x default theme.

Most of the changes involve reworking the HTML and CSS markup, but there are some noticeable changes to the look of the theme as well.

Note: These preview link will take you to themes.ode-is-simple.com and load that page with the selected theme. You may want to open the link in a new tab or separate window.

Preview

Preview of logic_mascot 1.2.6

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New version of the 'logic' the Ode 1.x default theme. You might guess that there aren't any major changes, and you'd be sort-of right.

Most of the changes involve reworking the underlying markup, but there are noticeable changes to the look of the theme as well (e.g. fonts are a little bigger all around, the date lines in the post area have changed, etc.)

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text_page, a new theme for Ode.

Get text_page theme

It's a very straightforward single column design with flexible width. Without sidebars it might not be the right default theme for everyone, but it's a great theme for reading longer posts.

Before you read about it, take a look.

Read this page using the text_page theme.

With this theme we can start to see the benefit of Ode's dynamic theme mechanism. We don't have to choose just one. We can have any number of themes active at the same time, all working together. This allows us the ability to really get creative while providing visitors to our sites the best possible experience.

For example:

Let's say the default theme on my site is a two column fixed width theme. I may like this layout because it's easy to work with, and allows me to have a sidebar where I can put info that I want to take out of the normal flow of posts (which start off at the top of category pages and the site root but eventually fall out of view, replaced by newer content).

In general that arrangement could work well, but when I have an especially long post I may want to maximize the amount of space in the browser window dedicated to the post. In this case, the sidebars are just in the way.

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