ê¿êspi20.com

I’ve been using this theme for over a year now.  It doesn’t look like the same theme the author created, but nearly 90% of it is all his work, so I’ve left his links intact and hope you will too if you decide to use this theme. It’s a very versatile theme that is easily customized. You don’t even have to know a lot of php to do it.

Upgrade Error

When I upgraded to WP2.8 the first thing I noticed was that I lost my categories. It took a bit of research on my part to discover how to fix the issue, but all-in-all, this was a very easy fix. I see from the author’s website that others are having the same issue, so I wanted to post the fix for it.

You must go into your theme header and footer files to effect the correction. It’s very easy to do from your WordPress dashboard. Simply click Appearance, then choose editor. When that window opens, you will see a list of files to the right and you will want to choose the Header file first.

The coding for the Header file will be displayed in the editor window and you want to look for the line about 2/3 of the way down that reads:

<?php wp_list_categories(‘exclude=1&orderby=order&show_count=0&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

All you have to do is change the word “order” after the = sign to “name” (no quote marks though)
So your resulting code will read:

<?php wp_list_categories(‘exclude=1&orderby=name&show_count=0&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

Now do the same thing in the footer file. It’s exactly the same code, so you can just copy and paste it from here. Make sure you do not have any trailing spaces after that > sign or you’ll get another error.

Threaded Comments

Have you noticed that my blog uses threaded comments? Would you also like to employ this on your blog as well? No plug-in was necessary! Changing to threaded comments was not hard to do and the complete instructions are provided by my good friend Lyndi over at Nice2all .

Appearance Changes

You’ll note that I made some changes to the appearance. I removed the logo image at the top and replaced all the images with those of my own.

The logo image removal required a bit of tweaking to the Header.php file (that file AGAIN!).  All I did was comment out the call for the image in the division called “logo”.

So my code reads:

<div class=”top-header”>
<div id=”logo”><!– taking this out for now to see how it looks
<a href=”<?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?>/”>
<img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/images/logo.gif” alt=”logo”/></a>–>
</div>

And by doing that, it removed the header image and scooched the entire page up which gives my readers a bit more of my content to see at the outset.

Changing the images was by far the easiest change to effect in the template. I began by downloading the files from the site, then exported all the files within. I opened the folder titled “images” and proceeded to create my own based on the sizes of the theme images. I replaced each image with my own image of the same size and used exactly the same name and image format. I then re-zipped the file and named it VersatilityLiteCustom and installed it to my theme directory. It worked perfectly straight out of the box.

I also tweaked the size of the side bar and post areas as I wanted more post area but still wanted a side bar that accomodated two 125×125 ad boxes without crowding. This change required my going back to that editor pane in the dashboard and opening the stylesheet. css file (it’s the default file that opens when you select the editor, so you should be there anyway).

I changed the side bar from 339 px to 275 px in the following code:

#sidebar-contain{
	float:right;
	padding: 0px;
	width:275px;
	padding:0 0 0 12px;
	overflow:hidden;
}

Then in the main content section, I increased the size of the content pane from 519 to 575.

That code is changed to :

#content{
	float:left;
	padding: 0px;
	width: 575px;
	padding: 0 15px 0 15px;
	overflow:hidden;
}

The last change I made to the theme involved fonts and colors. Those are also done on the stylesheet and simple search and replace does the bulk of the work there.

Conclusion

So now you know all my little secrets (well except the one that involves Fenphedra) and can now incorporate them on your own version of Versatility Lite. Good luck and good coding!

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