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?
For a couple of releases now, the Ahimsa theme for WordPress has included two shortcodes which I have been too lazy to document, and this post attempts to rectify that.
If you are not happy with just simple old Lightbox for displaying images (and image galleries), then the Fancybox is what you need, and happily for you, and using Fancybox in your blog is trivial with the Ahimsa theme using the qfgallery shortcode.
Here’s what it’s supposed to do:
And here’s how:
As is perhaps obvious, what the above does is create a thumbnail gallery (the thumbnails are sized at 128×128 pixels) of the three images, and attaches the Fancybox trigger to them, so that when a thumbnail is clicked the original picture pops up in a Fancybox window (which also provides navigation).
All arguments to the shortcode are optional.
The argument scale specifies if the image should be scaled down for the thumbnail or just a 128×128 part of it should be displayed in the thumbnail (the latter is the default). This is a good time to mention that thumbnails are generated in a hacky way: they are not created at all, but are merely browser scaled down versions of the original image. I admit this is a bad idea, especially if you have lots of images, and my only defence (if it can be called that) is that I created this shortcode to make it easy for me to post a few images without having to worry about scaling them to thumbnails, or having to use WordPress’s media manager, etc.
scale
The orient argument specifies if the thumbnails should be displayed left to right and then in additional rows if necessary (“landscape” mode, which is the default) or in a thin vertical strip with one thumbnail per row (“portrait” mode).
orient
The float argument translates to an equivalent setting for the CSS float property. If you want the thumbnail box to be to the right of the content, use the value “right”. Etc.
float
You can specify a name or title for each image by adding a “|” (pipe) symbol after the URL and then the text for the title.
FAQinWay is a trivial implementation of a FAQ (a list of answers to Frequently Asked Questions) in a page or post. The answers to each question is revealed below when the reader clicks on the question. For an example, see the Ahimsa FAQ page. Questions and answers are added using the FAQinWay shortcode thus:
[faqinway] This is the first question @@@ This is an answer to the first question $$$ This is a second question @@@ Answer to the second question [/faqinway]
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.
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.
Below are screenshots of Ahimsa 3.2 (download link coming next) for WordPress. The first screenshot highlights the two new visible changes (there are others under the hood): rotated text in the sidebar tab and logo support in the header. The others are screenshots of the theme as it appears on various browsers and platforms (click on image and check image title at the bottom for platform/browser information). Some of the screenshots are with a single sidebar setting and others with two sidebars — this is not an error, but a result of the screenshots being taken with different Ahimsa settings.
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 »
Sarvodaya is a new skin for the WordPress Theme Ahimsa and is available bundled in the 3.0 version of the theme. Below are some screenshots of this skin.
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:
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.
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.