Category: Web 2.0

The Soleil theme for WordPress was based on the original creation and colors by designer Carrie Petri for other blog systems. I just mixed the PHP code and some technical ideas thowards what a blog system should be.

Althought it looks really good, Soleil is way more than eye candy. It is unique due to this main features:

1. Localized on demand
   The blog generic control strings will appear in visitor’s language that he set on his browser. Also, all blog-specific strings as category names, post titles and personal links may have hooks for personal localizations. See bellow how to activate this feature.
2. Widgetized sidebar
   Soleil provides all its sidebar content as widgets. If you use the WordPress Widget Plugin, you’ll be able to visually rearrange the sidebar and also visually use more widgets from a vast network of developers.
3. Very friendly to feed readers
   Every aspect of a Soleil blog provides clear and intuitive links and icons to its feed version. Categories archive pages, comments, list of categories on the sidebar, etc. Browse my blog to see what I’m talking about.

All artwork was completely redrawed in CAD systems and in OpenOffice.org Draw to improve images quality. The vector files are included.

Other benefits of this theme are:

4. Shiny and vibrant colors, thanks to Carrie.
5. Certified to work on Firefox 2, IE 6 and Konqueror. This gives a clue it will look good in any other browser.
6. Efficient, yet well balanced use of the entire screen.
7. Intuitive icons for reply, trackback, blog, post and category feeds, etc.
8. Clear visual separtion between each post, each comment, etc.
9. Shows number of comments in evidence.
10. Direct links to post and comment editing (for administrator only).
11. Includes a style for printing that hides parts of the page irrelevant to this media.
12. Provide list of links with icons to popular feed readers.

Download the theme archive, unzip it in your [WORDPRESS_ROOT]/wp-content/themes directory, and select it in the Presentation tab of your WordPress admin interface. Organize the sidebar widgets (if you use the recomended Widgets Plugin) on the admin interface, Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets.

Soleil Predefined Style Classes

Soleil provides some CSS classes that I heavily use in my posts:

photo

To be used on image tags. Add margins, padding and a slim border. Use it like this:

<img class="photo" style="float right" …

command

From the docbook series and for technical writers, renders a computer command in evidence. Use it like this:

<span class="command">ls -al</span>

programlisting and screen

From the docbook series and for technical writers, renders a box with special fixed size font as a computer output or programlisting. Adds scrollbars if content is too wide, to not breake your layout. Usage:

<pre class="programlisting"> 
	// sourcecode of a program 
	code { 
		Some code 
	} 
</pre>

or

<pre class="screen"> 
	bash$ ls -al 
</pre>

filename

From the docbook series and for technical writers, renders a filename in evidence. Use it like this:

<span class="filename">/bin/kdb</span>

xmlbutton

An XML button maker, the one very popular on blogs etc. To get a button like My XML button, use as:

<a class="xmlbutton" href="http://someplace">My XML button</a>

articleinfo

Creates a nice may-be-floating box for you to show some information about the post. The box will appear in evidence but outside the stream of the text. See an example on this post. Usage:

<div class="articleinfo" style="float: right">Some info about this article.<div>

You should also use <h4> as the header for subtitles inside posts.

Displaying Links Correctly on Sidebar

Many blogs that use Soleil have their links looking bad on their sidebar. To fix this, you should go to your blog admin interface, select Links->Link Categories and edit each link category’s properties in a way that each item will be wrapped into an HTML <li> tag.

For example, my blog categories have Before Link: <li> and After Link: </li>

Soleil Localization and Internationalization

Soleil’s default language is english, and is currently localized to portuguese.
To localize Soleil to you language, go to soleil/languages and copy the theme-pt.po (portuguese language) file to theme-YOURLANGUAGECODE.po and edit it to fit your language needs. The file format is very intuitive and it contains all generic messages the theme uses.

You can also localize your blog specific strings as your category names, blog name, blog description, and even some posts titles. For this you have to edit personal-YOURLANGUAGECODE.po in the same way.

To compile a .po file, on Linux do this:

bash$ msgfmt -c -v -o theme-YOURLANGUAGE.mo theme-YOURLANGUAGE.po 
bash$ msgfmt -c -v -o personal-YOURLANGUAGE.mo personal-YOURLANGUAGE.po

The .mo files must be located under soleil/languages/ while the .po don’t have to be under your blog installation, live them in your PC only.

To activate on demand localization based on visitor’s prefered language, ensure your wp-config.php file contains this:

define ('WPLANG', substr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], 0, 2));

Enjoy.

• WARNING: This script is not being supported anymore since I moved to a much better blogging system with WordPress.

If you don’t want your blog visitors to be redirected to blogger.com website just to write a comment for your post, you are in the right place.

This page will show you how to include a comment form directly into your post page, just as you can see in this very page, bellow. After installing this solution in your blogger.com blog you’ll feel an instant increase in the number of comments people write for you, because a comment form right in the face of your visitor is way more intuitive and inviting tsule with nowadays blogger.com interfaces, and stepped out from a hack status into a clean, functional and well documented solution.

PLEASE, write a comment here, including a link to your blog so people can know who else is using this solution.

PLEASE, do not make test in this post. PLEASE, leave it for real comments or support questions. PLEASE, use this post to test the form.

Installing

1. Download this script and make it available somewhere on your website, for example from the URL http://my.website.com/resources/bloggerCommentForm.js (this is the URL we’ll use in our examples).
2. Edit your blogger.com template and look for the end of the HTML header marked by the </head> tag.
3. Right before the header ending include the following piece of code in a way that everything will look like:

   <ItemPage>
   <script type="text/javascript" xsrc="http://my.website.com/resources/bloggerCommentForm.js"  >
   </script>
   
   <script type="text/javascript">
   // Lets configure the comment form a little bit
   
   // Include some style
   commentFormStyle();
   
   </script>
   </ItemPage>  </head>

4. Now you’ll have to place a call to a JavaScript method that will render the form. Scroll down and look for the section on your template that renders the comment. It starts with a <div id=”comments”> tag. This code should be included right after it:

   <a name="postcomment"></a><h4>Write a Comment</h4>
   
   <script type="text/javascript">
   commentForm('<$BlogItemCommentCreate$>');
   </script>

5. Save your template and republish your blog.
6. Visit one of your posts page, see if the form appears, and try posting some different comments as different users.

Configuring the Form

You can configure the form, specialy for internationalization, in a very clean way without having to change the code. For example, look how it looks in a brazilian portuguese blog post.

1. For that, edit your template again and look for the script initialization part you just included in the <head> section.
2. You can define some JavaScript variables that will define the form language and other parametrizations. Copy and paste these defaults to start translating:

   <script type="text/javascript">
   
   // Lets configure the comment form a little bit
   
   // Include some style
   commentFormStyle();
   
   // General parameters
   var labelWidth = 80;
   var bloggerFormActionURL="http://www.blogger.com/login-comment.do"
   var confirmBeforePost = true;
   
   // Language defaults
   var bloggerUserLabel = "Blogger.com user";
   var otherUserLabel = "Other";
   var customUserLabel = "Name or nickname: ";
   var urlLabel = "URL: ";
   var anonLabel = "Anonymous";
   var rememberLabel = "Remember Me";
   var postedByText = "Posted by";
   var commentButtonText = "Post Comment";
   var previewButtonText = "Preview";
   var previewWindowTitle = "Comment Preview";
   var confirmText = "Post this comment?";
   var boldButtonText = "B";
   var italicsButtonText = "I";
   var linkButtonText = "Link";
   var linkPrompt = "Link Text:";
   var urlPrompt = "Link URL:";
   var quoteButtonText = "Quote";
   var quotePrompt = "Use your mouse to select the text"+
   " in the comment you want to quote.n"+
   "Then press the quote button.";
   </script>

Additionally, you may want to change the target links in your template to make them point visitors to the comment form in the post page. For example, I have the following piece of code in my template that renders each post footer:

<p class="post-footer">
<em><$BlogItemDateTime$></em> |
<a xhref="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"
title="permanent link">permalink</a>
<BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
<a class="comment-link"
xhref="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>#postcomment"><$BlogItemCommentCount$>
comments</a>
</BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
<BlogItemBacklinksEnabled>
<a class="comment-link"
xhref="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>#links"  >links to this post</a>
</BlogItemBacklinksEnabled>
<$BlogItemControl$>
</p>

This script is free and licensed under the LGPL.
Enjoy.

UPDATE 2006/10/27: THIS PAGE DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE. I MIGRATED TO WORDPRESS BLOGGING SYSTEM.

Go head and test the form bellow. This is a test page related to this post.