Update for Catching Elephant Theme
I’ve been working on an update for the Catching Elephant Theme. I just need to test it in some of the lesser browsers. So if anyone has a PC and they could send me some screenshots in IE that’d be rad. Once I’ve done that I’ll submit the update to the Theme Garden.
Lightbox for high res images
I’m using Fancybox to display high res images as an overlay. Although it will download the ‘high res’ image, it has been limited to 900px wide so it doesn’t look stupid in smaller browser windows. Hovering over an image will show a magnifying glass that you can click to zoom. It will only show up on images with a high res version. I did it this way so that click through links could still be present. This is a good example.
Better YouTube embeds
I’ve used Matthew Buchannan and Hayden Hunter’s Jquery plugin to make YouTube video’s look better. The toolbar (play button, scrubber etc.) now blends in with the background. And when they’ve been uploaded correctly, widescreen video’s should have the perfect window size. This is a good example. YouTube has a pretty ugly player compared to Vimeo, so any improvements are huge. Big props to the guys for working that one out.
Better Quote Posts
I recently re-did Link Posts. I’ve done quote posts to match. I don’t post many quotes but here’s an example.
Tweet the Short URL’s
I originally wanted to do this so it wasn’t Twitter specific. I was going to use javascript to copy the Short URL to the clipboard when you clicked it. But apparently that doesn’t work in Firefox because of some security business. The next alternative was just to have a link that you needed to select and copy, or right click and copy. Neither seemed easy enough to bother with. So I settled with Twitter. As it has a 140 character limit, it’s where most short URL’s are needed.
Unfortunately the {PostSummary} tag only works on permalink pages. So it is set up so that if you click Tweet It from the front page, it will simply send the URL to Twitter. But if you do it from a Permalink page, it will automatically put in a description. David Kaneda worked out a way to insert a description from the front page. But he used relatively complex jQuery to do it, and I honestly don’t think it’s worth it at this stage. I generally like to write my own description anyway.
Transparent images now sit on white
So they don’t look like they’re floating. This mostly happened with OS X window screenshots. They should now look like this.
Those are the brand new updates, but I recently also updated Link Posts and included Answer Posts. And before that added Pages support, more custom links and HUGE album art, so if you customised the theme early on and haven’t been getting these updates it might be worth reinstalling.
By the way, massively stoked that it has over four and a half thousand official installs. The more people that use it, the more reason there is to keep improving it. Thanks guys.
I think the only thing still left on the list of to do’s was to get Disqus comment counts showing on the front page (not just permalink pages). Unfortunately I’ve got no idea why it’s not working, and therefore don’t know how to fix it. So if anyone can work it out, please let me know.
