Finally, as of today, Marco Luthe Online! has a new face!

After altering Sadish Bala’s Mistylook theme ^[1] for a long, long time (it was the only theme i’ve been using up until now, and I stayed with version 1.0.1!), I have decided to give this website a whole new look.

Welcome the Cover WP Theme ^[2] by One Designs – which, of course, I also had to slightly alter.

Here are some of the adjustments I made:

• changed the number of pages shown in the horizontal navigation > 6,
• added a latest tweet container above the horizontal navigation,
• placed the search bar higher,
• used the “featured” container for “recently updated” posts,
• added number of posts per category and for the archive in the sidebar,
• shortened the archive to just as many entries as the blog roll,
• disabled thumbnails (there were problems using images from flickr.com),
• incorporated use of Pagebar instead of Pagenavi,
• the PHP Speedy WP Plugin ^[3] was responsible for delivering a blank search page when no post was found – so bye-bye: I have deactivated it,
• added an inital cap in the single post view (see wordpress guy ^[4] for a HowTo – thanks!) didn’t quite work the way I wanted: html entities at the beginning showed a large “&”, and the Tweetmeme plugin ^[5] seems to have broken that function… it’s a pity,
• added “Similar Posts” to the sidebar if a single post is viewed,
• adjusted the single post template to work with DISQUS ^[6] – instead of #comments, the comments area has to have the id #respond to work with the DISQUS plugin. Otherwise, “View Comments” will lead to nowhere,
• the plugin to embed videos from YouTube with a shortcode stopped working, so I looked through all my posts and adjusted them to the new WordPress built-in embed system ^[7]. The advantage is that I could get rid of another plugin,
• since the color of the note for updated posts ^[8] (within the post itself) did not manage the theme colors, I gave those paragraphs a CSS class of their own (whereas before, I used CSS directly with the <p>-element in the post),
• plus some smaller adjustments…

I also tried to cut down on plugins and scripts. At this very moment that I am writing this post, I still have some trouble with the search page: it appears blank when the search term can’t be found. Maybe it is a plugin interference…. I still have to check on that.

Hope you like the new look & feel!

[Update from 2010-06-23]

In the containers Recently Updated and Popular on the start page, I got rid of the post excerpt, because a video that was embedded with the Kimili Flash Embed plugin ^[9] crashed the layout in combination with get_the_excerpt() ^[10] – probably because some tags are not being closed properly. Hmm… I could probably add a filter to the_excerpt that filters out any shortcuts used to embed videos with that plugin – but that means I’d probably need some regular expression… does anyone out there have an idea? The shortcode starts with “[ kml_flashembed ... ]” (without the space after the left bracket). Maybe I can take the regular expression directly from the plugin, since it uses one itself to filter out the shortcode… any suggestion would be appreciated.

[Update from 2010-07-08]

Stopped using the initial cap for the post view… see item #10 in the list above.