Ahimsa for WordPress
September 2nd, 2007 by ravi

Widget Ready

Widget Ready


Collapsible Sidebar

Collapsible Sidebar Tab


Authors Section

Authors Section


Configurable Options

Configurable Options


Ahimsa for WP: Collapsible Sidebar in Action!

Ahren Code’s Ahimsa is a set of styles/themes which started out as a WordPress theme. This page relates to the WordPress theme. You can also download:

This WordPress theme doesn’t need screenshots, since it’s the very theme you see on this site! It’s an extremely amateur effort (especially in the sense of the principles of UI design) but I am putting it out into the world anyway, in the unlikely case that someone might find it interesting.

If you are interested in keeping up to date with this theme subscribe to this blog, or follow us on Twitter, or Facebook. You can also click on the Bug Tracker link to file bugs or feature requests against this theme.


Customisation

Skins

Ahimsa supports skins — CSS stylesheets that can be created and modified using the Ahimsa Options page of the Admin section of your blog. Skins can be used to customise the colour scheme of the theme to your liking.

You can even share your skin with other users. Upload the skin file (it can be found in the directory skins under the theme directory) to a site of your liking (I recommend Dropbox) and send me a link, or contact me via email and I can host the file for you. I will then provide download links in this page for each of these skins. If you plan to use such a user contributed skin, please note that I do not provide any sort of assurance on their contents, nor can I support them (sorry).

Custom Styling

If a skin doesn’t go far enough for you, and you are a CSS ninja who wants more control and detail, all you need to do is create a file called custom.css in the theme directory, in which you can add any styles you desire. And when you upgrade Ahimsa, this file is left alone, so your customisations are safe.

Custom Footer

Those little snippets of JavaScript and other code that sites like Google Analytics wants you to add to your site — typically you add them to your footer (though for Google Analytics there is a great plugin) and then when you upgrade/update your theme you lose them. To avoid that, you can create a file called footer-custom.php and put all such code in there. This file is automatically included in the footer by Ahimsa and is never touched by it. Just make sure your update process doesn’t nuke this file, if you have added customisations to it!

License

This theme is released under the latest version of the GPL (currently v3), whichever that may be at the time of your use. For the GPL, see: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.You are free to use this theme for any purpose you choose, in a manner that conforms to the GPL. I would like you to leave the attribution at the bottom of the theme, but you are not required to do so.

Installation

Visit the WordPress site for detailed and authoritative instructions on installing themes. For the impatient: it is usually as simple as extracting the archive and copying the directory (“ahimsa”) into your WordPress installation directory under wp-contents/themes.

Notes

This is by no means a “best practices”, complete or feature-rich theme. At some point, I hope it will be. In particular, you may wish to note the below:

  • The theme is intended to be bold yet pleasing. YMMV! ;-) It was built, like many other themes, by hacking the default. A cursory look at the contents will demonstrate the rather shallow understanding of the CSS and PHP involved. I hope to clean up most of that in future releases, if there is interest in this theme.
  • The theme uses rounded-borders using Mozilla/Gecko and WebKit/KHTML/Safari/Chrome specific CSS attributes. I could use the CSS3 border-radius attribute, and I probably will, but it won’t help much since IE does not support it anyway.
  • Ahimsa can be taken to mean “non-violence”.

If you like this theme, or especially if you decide to use it, send me email or post a link to this site, leave a comment here, or some such, so I know it was useful! And if you really, really like it, how about rating it at WordPress.org?

Translations

Some links to translations of Ahimsa into other languages:

PLEASE NOTE: these translations are not created or tested by me, but are the work of other Ahimsa users in the spirit of extending free software. I am grateful that they found Ahimsa worth the trouble of translating.



367 Responses  
  • TheJuice writes:
    November 26th, 2009 at 8:31 pm

    Testing with Firefox 3.6 Beta 3, there are some placement and alignment issues. It reproduces on this page as well. Not sure if this is a rendering bug, or a deficiency in Ahimsa.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 30th, 2009 at 11:40 am

      TheJuice, could you perhaps provide me a screenshot? Things seem fine for me on 3.6…

            Reply  
      • Chris Kaczor writes:
        January 21st, 2010 at 10:05 pm

        I entered a bug at Github with a screenshot. It happens with Firefox 3.6 release.

              Reply  
        • ravi writes:
          January 29th, 2010 at 3:32 pm

          Chris, thank you for filing that. I am working on it right now. Should have a new version out in a week or so.

                Reply  
  • Anton writes:
    November 27th, 2009 at 4:33 am

    Hi!
    I can’t change the sidebar-widgets in version 3.0! It’s a bug?

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 2nd, 2009 at 1:08 pm

      Anton, can you give me more info? I have noticed or heard of any such behaviour. Thank you.

            Reply  
  • Evan writes:
    December 2nd, 2009 at 11:54 pm

    Hiya Ravi,
    Awesome theme.
    Just a quick heads up, under Windows 7 64bit with IE 8 the rounded corners don’t work.
    Keep up the awesome work.

    Cheers

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 28th, 2009 at 11:13 pm

      Evan, thank you for the note. Yes, unfortunately support for rounded corners with IE is only partially implemented. Are you seeing no rounded corners at all?

            Reply  
  • David Ker writes:
    December 7th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    I really REALLY love this theme. You are very modest in your description. Thanks for creating it.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 28th, 2009 at 11:40 pm

      David, thank you for the kind comment.

            Reply  
  • John writes:
    December 7th, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    A GREAT theme, I love it as you can see. But I would love soooooooooo much to have a second sidebar.
    Thanks again for the great Job!

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 28th, 2009 at 11:41 pm

      Coming soon! Thank you for the patience and apologies for the delays. I promise to have the next version (with multi-sidebar support) out within 2-3 weeks.

            Reply  
  • drew3000 writes:
    December 9th, 2009 at 4:44 am

    This theme hit me as soon as I saw it. At first, the look of it in the thumbnail in WordPress themes made me think it was another of the same roundy cornered designs that are out there. Nice, but not exactly my cuppa. But after checking out the options and user experience and overall feel, I got what Kevin Spacey calls in those Olympus camera ads, “that hurty feeling.” It’s a freaking gorgeous piece of work, man. I’m going to start going through it and customize it now. I tend to update my blog design every year or there abouts, taking on themes that will give me something to learn from, so am looking forward to taking this one for a drive. Thanks for releasing it. Nice typography and quick load time.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 29th, 2009 at 1:34 pm

      Drew, thank you for the high praise. As you play around with the theme, please contact me if you need any questions answered or need help.

            Reply  
  • nonegiven writes:
    December 12th, 2009 at 11:11 pm

    Hi.

    I notice Ahimsa does not function properly with some plugins, .e.g. Visitors Maps, and some page layouts.

    With Visitor’s maps, it stops the map from showing, with some page layouts using tables, it complete screws up showing the comments and ‘older posts’ buttons at the top of the page.

    This does not happen with other themes on the same site.

    I guess it is something to do with the heavy use of tables in the design and some missing tags, so roll on a css version please. It is a great theme

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 29th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

      Hello, sorry to hear that. Can you possibly point me to a page where you are seeing these effects? Thank you.

            Reply  
  • Shawn writes:
    December 16th, 2009 at 1:34 am

    Thanks so much for this theme. I was working on a re-design, but came upon this layout by chance, and it is almost exactly what I had envisioned. I love the simple design elements, with the rounded corners, and the fluid width, which was my primary objective.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 28th, 2009 at 11:24 pm

      Shawn thank you for the note.

            Reply  
  • jared writes:
    December 17th, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    Hi,
    I love the theme, but I am having trouble inserting google ads above the main body of content, just under the header (site title). I would certainly appreciate your help in this matter. thanks for your time :)

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 24th, 2009 at 10:49 pm

      Jared, can you give me more details on what issues you are facing? Are you not sure where to insert the Google code? Or is it not showing up? etc. Thank you.

            Reply  
  • nonegiven writes:
    December 22nd, 2009 at 9:49 am

    Great template but needs a few fixes.

    I notice that the Sidebar menu appears at different widths on different pages; sometimes wide, sometimes narrow. This cannot be correct? Surely it should always be the same width?

    I also have a problem with the Visitor Map generator plugin. This works in other themes on my WordPress but when I chose Ahimsa, it does not. There must be some conflict or missing code.

    Any ideas how to fix the first, to make a standard sidebar size, and why Visitors Map might not show!?!

    Can I also suggest a default page height so that when empty or short the lay out remains the same … or aligns to the top?

    Will have a look at the code … thanks.

    Thanks

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 24th, 2009 at 10:53 pm

      Hello, the sidebar is written to take up the minimum width required (as determined by the widest non-wrappable widget/element). That should stay constant unless the sidebar contents (widgets) change between one view or another. That is not typically the case, but its possible that a plugin displays a widget or some sidebar content only in certain cases. Can you give me an example I can look at?

      To make the sidebar constant width, you can edit the stylesheet and use the #tdsidebar selector to set a width. Please contact me if you want finer details.

      Re: Visitor Map generator, can you point me to the plugin (is it this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/visitos-map-ip/)? It’s possible that it uses a JavaScript toolkit that clashes with one used in the theme.

      Your suggestion of a minimum height is a very good one, though I think IE does not always honour min-height. I have added it to my list of things to investigate/attempt for the next release.

      Thank you for your comment.

            Reply  
  • Annemarie Aarts writes:
    December 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    Hi Ravi!

    Thx for making a fabulous theme!
    I’d like to get rid of the \Comments are Closed\ bar and the Comments Feed ( in the right corner above). I don’t want people to comments on my website, so it’s not necessary.
    I searched for a a solution on support forums but it didn’t worked. Could you help me??

    Thx.

    Anne

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 28th, 2009 at 3:20 pm

      Anne, there are a couple of ways to go about this. Before I describe them, a word of warning: due to the process used by WordPress to upgrade themes, any customisations you make to the theme are lost during the upgrade. So, when you make these changes, please keep in mind that you have to back up your customised files before you upgrade. With that in mind:

      You can remove those blocks by editing the code (Dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor and choose to edit entry.php) and removing the corresponding code that generates them. While this makes the generated HTML/CSS clean, it is not what I recommend (to understand why read below).

      Another option is to style them out of what is visible on the page. You can use the display: none CSS attribute and value to hide elements. I recommend this option, and the reason is that the Ahimsa theme provides a special hook for CSS customisations: you can create your custom styles in a file called “custom.css” that you place in the same directory as the theme. Ahimsa will read these styles and apply them last, over-riding its own inbuilt default styles. In other words, style attributes you specify in this file over-ride Ahimsa’s defaults. And the nice thing about all of that is that you can save/backup this file and not worry about upgrade issues.

      So, to accomplish the above, you create a custom.css with the following in it:


      .postaction,
      .nocomments
      {
      display: none !important;
      }

      I have sort of overused the CSS class ‘nocomments’ which I will fix in a later release, but that should not affect you unless you have password protected pages.

            Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      December 28th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

      Oh one thing: the styles given above will completely remove the orange box, not just the comment feed link. If you want the box displayed, but only the comment feed link removed, let me know. To do that, we may have to go beyond CSS tricks.

            Reply  
  • Tania writes:
    December 30th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Could you tell me how to shrink the top read header area by half please as it’s just a little bit too big for my needs? Awesome theme btw, thanks :)

          Reply  
  • franco writes:
    January 6th, 2010 at 1:10 pm

    HI Ravi, was there a simple way to reverse the order of posts via your theme? I thought I saw a way but now I cannot seem to find it. I would like to show the oldest first, is this something you can assist with or is this a WP question? I do love your theme though, it looks great and is so clean and simple. Thanks..

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      January 7th, 2010 at 12:51 pm

      Franco, there is a way to accomplish this (the simplicity of which rests on how comfortable you are with editing the theme PHP files). See this page:
      http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts#Usage_Note. If this looks like something you want to try, let me know and I can give you more details.

            Reply  
  • izdelava strani writes:
    January 10th, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    Think i made a mitake, choosing blogger over the wp. Cos i guess wp has better looking templates and gadget than blogger. Is it too late to change teams?

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      January 13th, 2010 at 9:19 pm

      izdelava, I agree with you about WP over Blogger. I definitely recommend WP (of course I am not entirely unbiased ;-)). It may not be too late. WordPress can import posts from Blogger.

            Reply  
  • Houston Pearce writes:
    January 17th, 2010 at 2:22 pm

    I use the Ahimsa theme on my blog for my business. I have changed the colors around and removed the search box. It is the best theme I’ve ever used! I really appreciate it.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      January 18th, 2010 at 11:33 am

      Houston, nice colour scheme. Thank you for posting a comment.

            Reply  
  • Rebekah writes:
    January 25th, 2010 at 1:19 pm

    Love the theme!

    How, or rather where, do I put in the code snippet to change favicon.ico ?

          Reply  
  • jorge writes:
    January 28th, 2010 at 2:08 pm

    good work y love you theme and combine with mi site hahaha
    any way i have a question, how i hide the line in the title of your theme
    look my mod
    http://www.moonito.cl/web2/indexblog.html

    thanks
    Jorge Verdugo

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      January 29th, 2010 at 3:31 pm

      Jorge, very interesting!

      Do you mean the vertical line in the header? If so, the best way to get rid of it is to create a file called ‘custom.css’ in your theme directory and in it enter:


      #title
      {
      border-right: none !important;
      }

      You have to remember to save this file if and before you upgrade the theme.

            Reply  
      • jorge writes:
        January 29th, 2010 at 6:59 pm

        really thanks :D

              Reply  
  • Ahimsa 3.0 en español « Datapad de Korpil writes:
    January 29th, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    [...] La versión original de Ahimsa se consigue en la página de Ahren Code. [...]

          Reply  
  • Lindsay Oberst writes:
    January 29th, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    Hello Ravi,

    I’m enjoying your theme on my site (http://lindsayoberst.com) but I have a few problems:

    1. Can you move the sidebar to the right? (I can’t seem to find this info anywhere if this has already been addressed).

    2. I want all my content to fit on the page without the left-to-right scroll bar. How can I acomplish this?

    Thanks so much.

    ~Lindsay

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      January 29th, 2010 at 9:07 pm

      Lindsay, nice customisation!

      1. Unfortunately, sidebar on the right is currently not possible (moving it to the right will require moving the sidebar tab, so its not trivial) but its coming in a week or two.

      2. Ahimsa is a flexible width theme — it has no fixed width and takes on the width of the browser or the contents of the page, whichever is larger. In your case, the page is very wide because you have elements (like large images, e.g: http://lindsayoberst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/phoenix1.jpg) and non-wrapping HTML elements like tables, that cause it to be wide. Which I am afraid means that you will see this problem with any theme (unless the theme does funky things like resizing images to fit its idea of width, etc). Which in turn means that you have to examine the contents of the posts and format them so they don’t overflow.

      I hope that answers your questions. Contact me if you have more!

            Reply  
      • Lindsay Oberst writes:
        February 3rd, 2010 at 10:09 am

        Thanks, I appreciate that. How will the moving sidebar process work out? Will it require much editing? (thanks for this!)

        How will I know what size to re-format my contents so they don’t overflow?

        ~Lindsay

              Reply  
        • ravi writes:
          February 3rd, 2010 at 10:51 am

          Lindsay, you will be able to use Dashboard -> Appearance -> Widgets to configure what you want to appear in a left and/or right sidebar. It’s all GUI drag-drop that comes as part of WordPress, so should be simple, but I can always provide additional tips if you are having problems.

          Regarding horizontal content overflow, there is no magic number, because it depends on the screen resolution of each of your blog’s readers as well as how wide they set their browser. Some people like to maximise the browser so it occupies the entire screen. Others, like me, keep their browser to some size that occupies only part of the screen. I would guess that 1280×1024 is probably the most common screen resolution setting, so that gives you 1280 max pixels of width. I think it’s a good idea to assume that your readers’ browser window is no wider than about 900px. The sidebar will take up some of that width, perhaps 300px or a bit less. So, accounting for padding, etc, your *non-wrappable*/*non-breakable* content (e.g: images) should ideally be no wider than 500px.

                Reply  
  • Mindy writes:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 10:48 pm

    Thanks, Ravi, for helping me to resolve the minor issues I had on my client’s website at http://kennethburt.com/blog . We love the color palette and layout, finding it quite appropriate for the subject matter of this blog — Latino political history.

    The sidebar width on all pages is now consistent cross-browser and cross-platform. Adding breaks between the image and first text line on static pages resolved my text overlay issue. I wonder if anyone else had similar issues or if my problems had to do with the header image I added to header.php.

    Regardless, now it all seems to be working perfectly. My client is happy. I am happy.

    Creative, attractive theme!

    Thanks.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      February 4th, 2010 at 11:13 am

      Mindy you are most welcome. I was able to reproduce, though not consistently, the text overlay behaviour. Seems to happen only in Safari … very strange, and I have added a TODO to try to fix it. The header image in your blog is not unique, others use a header image as well. I need to find out why my theme gets confused by it (and renders the post content narrower than it should). That’s another TODO ;-).

            Reply  
  • Nakke writes:
    February 4th, 2010 at 7:26 am

    Hi

    Have anyone else noticed that in this theme if you are using firefox 3.6 it will display all the widget headings +/-15px lower than normal.

    How to solve this?

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      February 4th, 2010 at 11:06 am

      Nakke, indeed this has been brought up and one of you (my super-smart user community) has also figured out the fix (I need to find his name so I can credit him with the fix!). It will be rolled out today or tomorrow. So please stay tuned to the blog or Twitter feed.

            Reply  
  • Pablo writes:
    February 6th, 2010 at 11:30 am

    First of all, congrats for your work. This theme is awesome. I’ve been using it for some months now and just recently I noticed that the sidebar widgets got the initial line overlapped with its title.
    You can see it at http://es42.es

    It seems to be related to a malfunctioning style. The free text widget work great if I select the \paragraph\ option within WordPress so it gets a before it starts. But the rest of the widgets don’t get that and they appear a bit garbled. Other than that, this theme has proved to survive pretty well despite numerous wordpress updates.

          Reply  
  • Daniel Huckstep writes:
    February 8th, 2010 at 12:48 pm

    This theme is seriously awesome. So awesome, I have to shorten my comment to ‘srsly awesome’.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      February 10th, 2010 at 9:23 am

      Thank you Daniel! ;-)

            Reply  
  • Micah Sewell writes:
    February 16th, 2010 at 10:42 am

    Thanks so much! I love your theme. I’m using it on two of my sites already.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      May 11th, 2010 at 10:09 pm

      Micah, thank you for writing. It is always great to hear comments from my users. Especially the positive comments ;-).

            Reply  
  • Dáithí writes:
    February 20th, 2010 at 9:13 am

    Hi Ravi

    Love your theme – only thing is my pages don’t seem to be appearing on the home screen.

    I have set up different pages within the WordPress structure, but I can’t see them visible on the homepage.

    Can you advise or am I doing something stupid?

    Thanks

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      May 31st, 2010 at 10:59 pm

      Dáithí, sorry for the lack of response (I am afraid I am not able to keep up with the volume of messages on my blog). I see that your blog is at initial setup stage. When you ask about pages, do you mean you want to have links to them appear in your sidebar? Or do you mean you want a particular page as the home page for your blog? Can you comment? Thank you.

            Reply  
  • Rebekah writes:
    March 8th, 2010 at 5:33 pm

    Just a question … there isn’t any Ahimsa for Blogger, is there?

    I like it so much, and would like to use it for my other blog too.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      March 8th, 2010 at 5:36 pm

      Rebekah, unfortunately no, none that I support. There are some sites out there that seem to auto-convert WP themes to Blogger, but the results seem unreliable.

            Reply  
  • Jim Martin writes:
    March 12th, 2010 at 10:54 am

    Ravi,
    I just updated my template to the most recent version of your theme. I also updated Firefox. The blog looks very different now. The subject tabs on the side are out of position. Do you have any idea what could be causing this?

    Thanks,

    Jim Martin
    Waco, Texas

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      March 12th, 2010 at 4:51 pm

      Jim, I don’t see the issue with Firefox 3.6 (Mac OS X 10.5): http://grab.by/31qP. Can you post a screenshot of what you are seeing? Thank you!

            Reply  
  • WS writes:
    March 13th, 2010 at 8:12 pm

    I hate what the latest version of Ahimsa has done to the theme design on my website.
    How can I revert to the previous version?
    WS

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      March 13th, 2010 at 8:45 pm

      WS, do you mean the transparent sidebar? That does look bad. Do you want me to try to figure out why that happened? If you just want to revert, then you can find an older copy of Ahimsa at http://ahren.org/code/bit/ahimsa-wp-3dot0. Once you download the zip file, you have to unzip the file and transfer the resulting directory to your blog, to the wp-content/themes/ directory. If you decide to do this, let me know if you need more detailed help.

            Reply  
  • Frank writes:
    March 19th, 2010 at 8:32 am

    I am using your skin for my blog and LOVE IT. I think it looks great and it is so easy to see the important features like “comments.” I am wondering if it is possible to switch out the maroon-red header with my blog title for an image header to be the top of the blog?

          Reply  
  • Michael Vandeven writes:
    June 2nd, 2010 at 4:32 am

    Great theme. Please keep developing it.

          Reply  
  • Judith writes:
    June 18th, 2010 at 10:26 am

    Hi there

    I upgraded to WordPress 3.00 this morning and since then the sidebar tab doesn’t work at all.
    Any advice would be really appreciated.
    Thank you! :-D

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      June 18th, 2010 at 1:20 pm

      Hello Judith,

      I am investigating right now! Stay tuned.

            Reply  
      • Judith writes:
        June 18th, 2010 at 3:43 pm

        Thank you! :-D

              Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      June 18th, 2010 at 5:37 pm

      Judith,

      I cannot reproduce your problem at my end (everything works fine for me). The error reported by the browser is in the jquery-ui library that is included in my theme. However, that same library works fine for me. I need more info, I am afraid. Can you let me know (you can email me if you wish to code [at] ahren [dot] org) what plugins you have installed? Where your blog is hosted? How you performed the upgrade? What version did you upgrade from?

      Thank you.

            Reply  
      • ravi writes:
        June 18th, 2010 at 8:58 pm

        Judith, I think I know the source of the problem: I think you are using a plugin called “mingle” that also includes a version of jquery-ui, but a different version than what is included in my theme. One possible option you can try is to comment out the inclusion of jquery-ui in header.php in my theme. If you want to give that a try and need further details, please let me know.

              Reply  
  • GeorgWP writes:
    June 20th, 2010 at 9:20 am

    Hi,

    Danish languages files are available here:

    http://wordpress.blogos.dk/søg-efter-downloads/?did=99

    You are welcome to include them!

    Best regards,

    GeorgWP

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      June 20th, 2010 at 9:11 pm

      George, thank you for that. I will post a link to your site on the Ahimsa page.

            Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      June 24th, 2010 at 10:41 pm

      Linked to from the Ahimsa page. Thank you again, Georg!

            Reply  
  • Babs writes:
    June 21st, 2010 at 9:30 am

    I’ve been using this theme on one of my other sites, since you made it available, and just decided to change my personal blog over to it. I like the Sarvodaya skin so much that, while I do plan on tweaking the color scheme, I’m in no hurry to do so. :)

    One question. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place, but is there a way to hide just one sidebar? I like that I’m now able to have two sidebars (which is the reason I switched over to this theme), but I’d like to have the right one hidden at all times, and both hidden on posts and pages.

    Much thanks!!!!!!

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 10:46 am

      Hello Babs, thank you for your comments. To do what you want (hide just one sidebar) you need to hack the code a bit. Not a lot, so if you are up to it, let me know and I can help. We might even be able to get away with something as simple as the following in custom.css (I am thinking off the top of my head here, and could be wrong!):


      #indexpage #tdsidebarright
      {
      display: none !important;
      }

      I assume you want the right sidebar collapsed, but openable, yes?

            Reply  
      • Babs writes:
        June 22nd, 2010 at 2:51 pm

        Yes. Sidebar collapsed but openable, would be good.

        I have no problem with simple tinkering of code. In fact I just was playing around with the theme functions to see if toying with the script might do the trick. :)

        I do have to ask, though: Was there an earlier version of Ahimsa that allowed you to do this configuring from the Options page? I could’ve sworn there was, but I may just be loopy. :D

              Reply  
        • ravi writes:
          June 24th, 2010 at 10:39 pm

          Babs, are you planning on keeping Ahimsa or switching over to Rachel. I can help you with the above if you plan to keep Ahimsa as your theme. let me know!

                Reply  
          • Babs writes:
            June 25th, 2010 at 10:39 am

            Hiya Ravi!

            Actually I’m hoping to use both.

            Ahimsa for my personal site, and Rachel for my recipe “book”. :)

            I think this is the first time I’ve used two different themes from the same designer. Keep up the good work!

                  Reply  
  • Welcome to our new blog! | Houston Inc. Blog writes:
    June 22nd, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    [...] old blog’s theme is Ahimsa by Ahren Code. The new blog’s theme is Twenty Ten by WordPress. The main reason I chose Twenty Ten is [...]

          Reply  
  • Vera writes:
    June 25th, 2010 at 1:49 pm

    Ravi,

    Your theme is the best! Period! But because I want to use BuddyPress Plugin and create a Social Network with that, I wonder if you’re working on a BuddyPress compatible version or if you can help me figuring out out to change the skin colors and make the tabs to appear on the right side, like the other templates do.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      June 26th, 2010 at 1:39 pm

      Vera, I have never worked with BuddyPress before. Let me start looking at it to see if it is easy to port my theme to it. Have you given this a shot: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/. The developer promises that its entirely reversible.

      By “tabs” do you mean the sidebar widgets? Ahimsa 3.2 let’s you have left, right or both sidebars, so what you want should be do-able using the Widget customisation menu.

            Reply  
  • Playground» Blog Archive » Custom Website Design vs Wordpress writes:
    July 3rd, 2010 at 5:09 pm

    [...] in 2 minutes and loved it so as you can see the themes that come with WordPress are truly awesome! Ahrens Theme is gorgeous so we will stick with this [...]

          Reply  
  • gwendolen writes:
    July 5th, 2010 at 8:50 am

    Hi ravi,

    We updated to WordPress 3 and Ahimsa 3.2. I’m having trouble with comments. It seems this widget is causing th epage to go blank, when I click on commnents:

          Reply  
    • gwendolen writes:
      July 5th, 2010 at 8:54 am

      Can’t show the javascript here. But it’s a banner for Kiva.org

      http://www.kiva.org/banners/bannerTower.php

      I disabled it on the site for now. What do you advise?

            Reply  
      • ravi writes:
        July 5th, 2010 at 10:59 am

        Gwendolen, making sure I got this right: you have a banner (at the top of the page?) that is from kiva.org and if you enable it, then clicking on “Comments” (in any post on the main/home page?) then you get a blank page? Can you let me know what browser you use? If it is Safari or Chrome or Firefox, it would help to get any Debug Console messages that the browser reports.

              Reply  
        • gwendolen writes:
          July 5th, 2010 at 2:11 pm

          thanks Ravi,

          The banner was in the sidebar. I use Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; nl; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6 GTB7.0

                Reply  
          • ravi writes:
            July 7th, 2010 at 10:26 pm

            Gwendolen, was my description of your problem correct (apart from the fact that the banner was in the sidebar)? Can you send me the Error Console output from Firefox when the banner is present and you see the error? Thank you.

                  Reply  
  • Ronnie writes:
    July 9th, 2010 at 8:53 am

    I tried to translate this wonderful theme into Dutch. De (posts) comments form however is still in English. I don’t know how to solve this. Can somebody help me with this? Thanks in advance.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      July 9th, 2010 at 11:21 am

      Ronnie, I just quickly looked through my code and the necessary i18n mods are there for these values. Can you perhaps send me your .po file (email to code [at] ahren [dot] org works). Thank you.

            Reply  
  • Tom writes:
    July 10th, 2010 at 7:30 am

    Hi I have used this theme with great success on my site, I am doing a new one and the sidebars are different sizes is there a way of fixing the sidebars to say 200px

    Also when you go to the main page of my site the header is causing the logo to drop but when you click on a single post that shows the right height

    I have used this on my other site with no problems like this any ideas

    website is http://www.m-k-racing.net/blog

    Thanks for your help in advance

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      July 21st, 2010 at 11:49 pm

      Tom, the logo looks fine for me on the main page. See: http://cl.ly/a3167e152a6d9fbd218b. For fixed width sidebar, you can edit custom.css and add something like the below (at the end if you already have other stuff):


      .sidebar
      {
      width: 200px !important;
      }

            Reply  
  • Todd writes:
    July 26th, 2010 at 10:13 pm

    Titles lengths / wrapping

    Love this theme!!!

    Now the title on Posts & Pages expands rightward with no wrap. For long titles, this expands the right sidebar off the screen. Is there a way to have the title continue on a new line or two even with longer titles so that margins don’t expand?

    Pictures and embedded video in posts will do the same. You need to limit their size or margins will expand, sidebars will disappear. Possibly that is what the others have been experiencing. Just limiting there size takes care of this.

    But help on wrapping the title would be appreciated.

    Thanks!

          Reply  
  • Sarah Craftylocks writes:
    July 27th, 2010 at 4:13 pm

    Hi Ravi,
    I love this design and have used it for my site – http://www.papercraftsforchildren.com/. I have also incorporated the look into PDF versions of tutorials – an example is http://www.papercraftsforchildren.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tutorial_crepe-tassels.pdf.
    I am currently working on an e-book that uses your design as inspiration for the look. The book is related to paper crafts for children. In the introduction pages I will credit your design as the idea for the book design. From the GNU General Public License info this sort of use did not seem to be a problem, although it was not explicitly mentioned. Let me know if there are any issues with this sort of use.
    Many thanks for the great design!
    Regards,
    Sarah

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      July 27th, 2010 at 4:26 pm

      Sarah, I am glad to hear of it, and no, there are no issues at all with what your propose to do.

            Reply  
  • Dakshim writes:
    August 8th, 2010 at 4:29 pm

    Your theme is superb and cool,
    but there is a problem with your theme, if we used your theme as it is, then it’s not considered be to SEO Friendly,
    as if you see your theme in lynx browser ,then it is seen to be focused on sidebars not on main content.
    and the symbol “§” adds more inconvienient to the theme….

    Therefore i suggest you to make SEO Compatible version…..which is with valid XHTML…

    Secondly ,I want to create a look a like theme as your was [with SEO Compatibility,Adsense optimized and Valid CSS and XHTML]….
    Is there any Term or policy regarding modifying or copying the theme………

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 8th, 2010 at 9:24 pm

      Dakshim, thank you for your comment. I always try to run my theme through the W3C validator and 3.2, for instance, has less than 5 errors (of which all or most were unavoidable for various reasons). I will try to add more changes based on your comment in the next update.

      Regarding changing the theme: you are encouraged to do so. The theme is released under GPL which is designed to facilitate just the sort of modifications you propose, so go for it (here’s the GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html).

            Reply  
  • Dakshim writes:
    August 11th, 2010 at 11:59 pm

    There is suggestion for you,

    Firstly, as you’d provided option for admin to select skin, you can also gave this option for visitors of your website .like using “nk theme switch” ,i’d given this option for visitors on ironrates.com. this plugin saves the visitors option as cookie ,so that browser will load that theme.

    Secondaly ,You can use Jquery for comment box.i’d seen in many themes that a person is using thickbox or colorbox for framed comment box.

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 31st, 2010 at 5:20 pm

      Dakshim, thank you for your suggestions. User triggered skin switching is an interesting idea that I will consider for a future release.

            Reply  
  • gkp writes:
    August 14th, 2010 at 5:40 am

    hi, thanks for the great theme, I have just upgrade my wordpress to 3.01 and ahimsa 3.2, but I found the sidebar was missing, no matter what I set at the option page, have totally no idea about this, can you help me?

    the blog’s address is http://xingfuchen.com/, many thanks!

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 14th, 2010 at 9:45 am

      Hello, yes, this is strange! Can you tell me what your Ahimsa options settings are (Dashboard -> Appearance -> Ahimsa Options). For an example, here are some settings on my test server: http://cl.ly/e953952e27e88b2f9679.

      Also, do you have access to your web server error logs? It seems to me that for some reason the sidebar code is not getting loaded at all, at the back end. One possibility is that you don’t have all the theme files (perhaps the upgrade failed silently). If you have access to the web server files, can you send me a listing of files in the directory YOUR-WP-ROOT/wp-content/themes/ahimsa?

            Reply  
  • badjao writes:
    August 18th, 2010 at 7:40 am

    This is an exceptional theme. In the past I have used simple theme, I don’t like heavily premeditated themes. But with this my mind change.

          Reply  
  • Adylis writes:
    August 26th, 2010 at 12:57 pm

    Hi. Thanks for the nice theme!
    I switched Setting/Reading menu to “Front page displays: Front page” and the theme is jumping for 1 line down after refreshing.
    What I have to do to avoid this “jumping”?
    2. How I can switch off Site and Comments buttons at the top of the theme?

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 31st, 2010 at 5:19 pm

      Adylis,

      I see no jumping in Safari 5. What browser are you using? I can try it with that.

      Re: turning off Site and Comments RSS feed buttons, one option is to hide them using CSS. Go to Dashboard -> Editor, and edit custom.css, and add the below:


      #rsslinks
      {
      display: none !important;
      }

      If you are unable to edit custom.css, you can just add the above to the end of style.css (but if you do that, please remember to save these changes somewhere when you upgrade Ahimsa to a newer version).

            Reply  
  • Sander writes:
    August 30th, 2010 at 6:41 pm

    Hi there. I seem to be having a problem with the Comment date-time stamp. There is no space between the Date, the “at” and the Time. I have NOT changed your code. I would appreciate any help you can provide

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 31st, 2010 at 4:40 pm

      Sander, yes, this was a known problem but I thought I had fixed it… investigating… please stay tuned!

            Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 31st, 2010 at 5:14 pm

      Sander, found the fix… unfortunately I had not submitted it to WordPress.org. I will try to do so tonight, but it might take a few days before it shows up at WordPress.org (since they have to review and approve the update). In the meantime, I will also upload the new version of Ahimsa with this fix to my blog from which you can download it, if you are in a hurry.

            Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      August 31st, 2010 at 5:16 pm

      Sander, I found the fix, but I forgot to submit a new version to WordPress.org. I will try to do so tonight but it might take a few days before it goes live there (since they have to review and approve the new version). In the meantime I will also make the new version of Ahimsa, with the fix, available through my blog, from where you can download and install it if you are in a hurry.

            Reply  
  • StarCapt writes:
    August 31st, 2010 at 6:37 pm

    I want to make a different arangement of items in the sidebar for post and pages. Is this possible?

    On my website, I have a sidebar slideshow that I want to use only in one of the pages.

    SC

          Reply  
    • ravi writes:
      September 1st, 2010 at 10:58 am

      Hello StarCapt, it is not possible (AFAIK) to have selective sidebar contents per page/post, in WordPress. However, it’s quite possible someone has written a plugin that supports such a capability. Have you tried looking through the plugin repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/?

      Also, the latest WordPress has some very interesting new user customisation features that I have not yet caught up on; it’s possible one of these options might well implement what you are looking for, so please take a look at the latest documentation. The Ahimsa theme should support any such feature, including those implemented as plugins.

            Reply  
  • Ryan writes:
    October 7th, 2010 at 7:37 am

    Hi im using ahimsa 3.2 on my site http://greypartridge.info and I love it! only one problem i am finding, i have analyzed my pages for SEO and none of them have any or tags, im just wondering how I can add my own? many thanks, fantastic theme :) A+++

          Reply  
  • Ryan writes:
    October 7th, 2010 at 7:39 am

    sorry thats meant to say any h1 or h2 tags, thanks :)

          Reply  

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