The only three things guaranteed in life are death, taxes… and your periodic update to the Ahimsa theme. Fortunately only the first two are injurious to your health, while the surgeon general actively encourages use of the Ahimsa theme by pregnant women and children ages four and above.

So, here it is, Ahimsa 3.3!

What’s new?

• Bottom bar fading in index page now uses jQuery
• Show permitted HTML tags when comment box gains focus
• Edit/Reply for Comments hide/display on hover
• Added a download box style (use a div with class=downloadbox and within that a link to the download with class=download)
• New “comment guide” option to display some help text next to comment box
• Fixed comment date/time display weirdness
• Added Google “Droid Sans” font as fallback for “Trebuchet MS”
• Converted all relative font specifications to absolute pt format
• Lightened blockquote and list backgrounds in default skin
• Removed first letter styling for post content
• Changed behaviour of blockquotes and lists not to stretch background under jacent elements
• Handle lists within blockquotes by not styling them
• More spacing between posts in the index/home view
• Fixed the “single pixel offset” problem when sidebar is collapsed
• Made background colour more consistent during slidebar slide in/out
• Fixed an issue where post bottom bar background colour did not extend all the way to the bottom
• CSS cleanup and many, many small fixes
• Tested on Firefox 3.6.3, Safari 5, Chrome 5.0

You can now download Version 3.2 of the Ahimsa for WordPress theme from the link below, or from the WordPress.org site shortly (once it is approved). If you are upgrading from a version of Ahimsa older than 3.1 and you have made customisations and created custom skins, you should first upgrade to Ahimsa 3.1.1 after reading about it.

• Tested: Safari4, Chrome 3 on Win, Chrome 5 for Mac, Firefox 3.6, IE7, IE8, Opera 10.53, PHP 4.3 and above, WP 2.8 and above
• No longer supported: IE6, Safari < 3.1
• Internationalisation support (potential translators: please see included POT file)
• Rotated text in sidebar tab
• Support for header logo
• Changes for rounded corners on Opera 10.53 and higher
• More robust parsing by QFGallery shortcode
• Theme now uses jQuery bundled into WordPress
• Removed jQuery conflicts with MooTools (and MooTools based plugins), etc
• Sidebar show/hide effect is now “slide” rather than “fade”
• Added hint on permitted tags when focus is on comment response form
• New screenshot! ;-)
• Various other fixes

I am yet to write up instructions on how to use the two shortcodes (QFGallery and FAQinway) built into Ahimsa. I will get to that as soon as I get this post out.

If you are an Indianapolis Colts fan, take heart. All is not wrong with the world, for now there is a new version of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress. Alright, okay, a new version of some WordPress theme does not equal a SuperBowl ring, but remember, you don’t get to wear a SuperBowl ring but you do get to decorate your blog as you desire!

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: You can now download this version of the theme from the official WordPress site as well.

Download Ahimsa 3.0 for WordPress

With apologies for all the delays, and for the incomplete features and issues that remain, I am releasing Version 3.0 of Ahimsa for WordPress.

There is a lot in this new release (hence the bump up to version 3, rather than the 2.3 that was initially planned). Here’s a summary:

First the fine print

This release includes cleanup of the stylesheet. If you have custom CSS changes or equivalent, please beware (also see my offer towards the end of this post). Your custom skins will need to be updated to the new styles. You can do that by checking the “Update Skins” checkbox in the Ahimsa Options page of the admin section of your blog, and then clicking on Save Changes. The AhrenCode supplied skins (Kind of Blue, A Grey Mood) are already updated to the new style, so this step is not required in their case. The corollary is that if you have made custom modifications to these themes, then please save them before you install this version. Finally, as of this release, there is not even a pretense of IE6 support. Sorry, its just too much work.

New Features and Fixes

• Custom skin editing: if you created a skin in the past and were frustrated by the inability to edit it, this might be a bit of relief. You can now edit the skins you create (or have created) — the limit is that the skin has to be the current selected one. As the above fine print notes, the style sheets have now changed, so follow instructions above to first update any skins.

• New Skin “Sarvodaya”: this update includes a new earth toned and simplistic skin called Sarvodaya. Give me your thoughts on it!

• IE Rounded Corners: don’t get excited. This has turned out to be a horrible affair. After evaluating 10 or so JavaScript plugins and libraries, I settled on two that provide some support for rounded corners in Internet Explorer. A lot of disclaimers apply: no rounded corners for the titles, sidebar widgets, the action bubbles, etc; and an artifact: a small white section is displayed under the bottom bar of each post. If all of this is palatable to you, then visit the Ahimsa Options page and turn on IE rounded corners support. If you notice anything worse than the above, turn it off and let me know.

• Custom modifications support: for your own CSS customisations, or JavaScript snippets and such that you may need to add to the footer, there are now two files that you can use: <code>custom.css</code> (for your style overrides) and <code>footer-custom.php</code> (for your footer snippets). The stylesheet <code>custom.css</code> is loaded last by the theme, so you can override any of the styles in this file. And since these files are external to the theme files, your modifications are safe from theme upgrades (watch out, however, that your theme update does not nuke your entire theme directory, killing your custom files!).

• Proper Comment Reply Form AJAX behaviour: WP 2.7 introduced the feature of moving the reply box up immediately after a comment when you click to reply. That behaviour was broken in Ahimsa and has now been fixed.

• Share your skins: this is not a change to Ahimsa itself, but if you have created a custom skin that you want to share you can now do so. See the instructions on the Ahimsa page.

• W3C XTHML 1.0 Standard validation: many, many fixed to satisfy the W3C validator. One or three issues might persist but most are now gone. Check it out and let me know!

• Multi-page suppport: Ahimsa did not include support for mutli-page posts. It now does.

• Other fixes:
  • Fixed input fields in response form: The response form had ridiculously long input fields for Name, URL etc. That has now been fixed.
  • Increased line spacing: makes for easier reading for your audience.
  • New screenshot: the current one dates back to an Ahimsa 1.x release!
  • More information in the Options section
  • Fixed a bug where the date bubble in comments was getting chopped off on the right.
  • And a lot of other minor issues.

Many of you have waited patiently for this update and I hope this is worth the wait. As always, I greatly appreciate your feedback.

And if you have done customisations of the theme with which you need help, or if your skin does not update properly, etc, please do contact me and I will be glad to help.

Below is the download link for version 0.8 of the Ahimsa theme for Tumblr. Note that it was rejected by the powers at Tumblr for not meeting their aesthetic standards (ouch!), so use at your own risk. Don’t know what Tumblr is? It’s a “tumblelog” service, a sort of mini-blog, for posting quick notes, pictures, etc. Another player in this space is Posterous, a fast expanding service that provides unique email based posting and commenting and a range of other great features.

Ahimsa for Tumblr Version 0.8

If you are curious about how it looks, check out Ahren Code on Tumblr.

Below is the download link for version 2.2 of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress.

Ahimsa for WordPress Version 2.2

What’s new:

• Fixes for IE6/7/8. No rounded corners on IE yet (and perhaps never), but lots of font changes, cleanup, IE specific style adjustments to make the theme render tolerably decent on IE.
• Fixed various bugs in the theme including bad comments and reply box rendering (thanks to various Ahimsa for WP users for pointing this out).
• Fixed JavaScript error(s) which were causing problems with IE in particular.
• Fixed bug where sidebar did not extend the entire length of the page when collapsed and restored.
• Fixed issue: pingbacks and trackbacks were not being displayed.
• Very preliminary/alpha implementation of custom skins. Currently, using a very simple interface, you can add your own colour schemes to Ahimsa for WP. An upcoming blog post will provide details. A few words of caution: there is no way to edit a “skin” using the UI and this implementation might change in a future release.

Stay tuned to the blog for additional info on skins.

Below is the download link for version 2.1 of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress.

Ahimsa for WordPress Version 2.1

What’s new:

• Support for WordPress 2.7′s new comment mechanism (including threading, paging, per comment replies).
• Some changes to comments section, including:
  • Consistent use of title and action capsules.
  • Moved reply form to its own box.
• New configuration options for/to:
  • Default display of sidebar in posts and pages.
  • Turn off the § prefix symbol for sidebar sections.
  • Turn off display of date/author for pages.

Below is the download link for version 2.0 of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress.

Ahimsa for WordPress Version 2.0

As indicated by the major version number change, there are a lot of new features in this release:

• Admin preference panel for setting customising various settings
• Collapsible sidebar:
  • Sidebar now present on pages and posts also, but collapsed.
  • Sidebar visible on main/home page but collapsible.
  • Tab on side of main section can be used to hide/unhide sidebar.
  • Sidebars collapse with neat fade effect on non-IE browsers.
• Authors section in sidebar can now be disabled if so desired.
• Custom copyright text shown at bottom of page.
• Credits (back to my site) are no longer always visible at bottom.
• Login/logout and RSS links now moved to the top.
• Smaller font size for the page, post and comment text.
• More XHTML compatibility.
• Category and Tag bubbles more subtle on main page:
  • Option to fade them unless hovered over, to minimise distraction.
  • More subtle rendering of tags and categories without bubbles.
• Support for a “Links” section at the top of the main/home page, using
  the Delicious for WordPress plugin (plugin has to be present).
• More consistent styling (e.g: Next/Previous page links at bottom.
• Removed the white border around main section.
• More attempts at decent IE rendering. Still no curved borders, but
  post titles now render similar to Firefox/Safari/Chrome. A lot of
  such IE specific fixes.
• Dulled down the rather bright bluish colour of quoted text.
• Even for long blog titles, space between title and vertical bar
  in header is preserved.
• Lots of other subtle fixes and changes.

A word of caution: some of these changes might be reversed in a later release. I am ambivalent about:

• Replacing the clean green line separating the bubbles for categories
  and tags with a fading grey box. The green line might return!
• Reducing the font size of entry text. I have to see how this renders
  across browsers, fonts and screen resolutions.
• Top fixed section for login/logout and RSS links might undergo more,
  including perhaps moving to the left edge of the page.

Just realised that I had not uploaded Version 1.2 of my Ahimsa theme for WordPress here, though I had posted it at wordpress.org. Here it is:

Ahimsa for WordPress Version 1.2

This version introduces a few changes:

• Category and tag bubbles
• Support for sidebar widgets
• Other WordPress.org theme requirements
• Lots of other features that I now forget!

This release includes:

• Curved border for post entries
• Removed border/underline for list items
• Added background colour for UL (should do OL!)
• Background colour change for comments, reply box
• Changes to reply submit button
• Widened blockquote width

And various other small changes and fixes. This site has already been updated with this version of the theme.

Download: Ahimsa-0.5.zip