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, please consider 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.
