Posted by Bryan on September 24, 2008 under Featured Articles, Theme News | 
The Ministry Theme is the result of a whole lot of planning and work. Our desire has been to offer a WordPress theme to the Christian community that was designed by someone in ministry who knew what a church needed in a web site. Although ownership of the Ministry Theme has changed, the vision is still the same.
- Something that looked nice and clean – a design that featured the content of the site well.
- Something easy to update – and few systems are as easy to update as WordPress.
- Something that was pre-designed to feature the elements that church web sites need the most – events, articles, and lots of informational pages.
We’re still perfecting the theme in the background. We want to create quite a few variations and skins for the Ministry Theme. Some churches need a dark background, others a grunge feel. Every church has its own personality and we hope to create a framework that will feature the personality of any church. We will also be creating a theme options page so that you can more easily change some of the elements of the front page and sidebars of the site. Here’s a feature list…
- Church and ministry-friendly layout.
- DHTML Drop down menu, automatically generated by page structure.
- Tabbed sidebars for a concise way to communicate information.
- Custom pages for home, links, and archives.
- Featured Post on the front page with built-in thumbnail support.
- Sub-featured posts on the front page as well.
- WordPress 2.8 ready, including handling of captions and images.
- Gravatar/avatar support is built into the comments.
- Base theme is relatively image-free for fast loading.
Keep watching for further developments and let us know what you’d like to see in the comments section below.
Posted by Bryan on under Theme Help |
The tabbed areas at the top of the sidebar can be used for a variety of things. Communicate to different audiences (as shown in the first box) or consolidate basic information (as shown in the second box). The third box on this demo outpus a list based on the WPListCal plugin.
Please know in advance that the tabbed area doesn’t work very well in IE6, but it does degrade. The tabs turn into h2 headings. The drawback is you lose the white background and it stretches the sidebar further down the page. We’re following in the path of 37 Signals in not spending hours and hours of time trying to fix every little detail for IE6. We want IE6 users to be able to read the content, but we’re not concerned with every visual effect going well. It’s time we grew beyond the old and busted browser.
You could also add an email subscription form using code generated by FeedBurner or FeedBlitz or another email and feed list manager.
You could also show recent photos as clickable thumbnails using Flickr and the Flickr plugin from Tan Tan Noodles.
Posted by Bryan on under Theme Help |
This is just a post to show you what some images will look like in your finished site when you add them using WordPress’ cool built-in image uploading functionality. The first one, at the top, is an image that “floats” to the right with the text wrapping around it.
You can change the default image sizes under the Settings > Miscelleneous area of the WordPress Admin area and there are plugins available to refresh all images on your site should you ever change these settings. Just remember that images are sized by WordPress as you upload them, so if you change your mind on the size later, you’ll need to change your code by re-uploading and re-inserting the image.
Just above is an image that’s aligned to the center using the “Add media” tool, and after the next paragraph are some images as thumbnails aligned to the left, but not using the “Left” alignment in the “Add Media” window, but rather with “none” selected next to alignment. Left alignment works similarly, but allows text to wrap around the image, which is fine unless the image is at the end of the article, in which case they will hang off the bottom of the article area.
One hint about WordPress (at least 2.6.*) is that the system automatically uses captions if you fill in the Caption field. We leave that blank. Then, we switch over to HTML view and add in a description of the image where the code says alt=”", between the quotation marks. This “alt” text serves at least 2 functions. One, it shows up if your image cannot be displayed, so at least people know what kind of image was supposed to be there. And second, search engines can’t admire your pictures, but they can catalog what’s in the picture using this “alt” text.
Posted by Bryan on September 23, 2008 under Uncategorized |
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