Jochen Bauer

You can read this post in German as well - visit page two.| Um diesen Beitrag in deutsch zu lesen, bitte nach unten scrollen und die Seite 2 besuchen.

blitzblank is the name of a wordpress theme. blitzblank based on “YAML”. YAML is an acronym for “Yet Another Multicolumn Layout”, an XHTML-CSS-Framework. Due to this foundation your blog will have a modern layout and your blog will support webstandards.

By changing a few lines of code you can create countless other layouts, for example changing the whole navigation, switching from a fixed width to full flexible float layouts or you switch from three columsn to two, one or four columns - just a few lines of code must be changed. Fortunately there are several tutorials in the online-documentation of the YAML-Website. Moreover you will find lots of comments in the css-files of blitzblank. If there is a YAML-upgrade, you’ll just overwrite the “yaml” folder and all will work without problems. Your individual files are in the “css” folder and this won’t be touched. Summing up, a theme based on YAML is browserfriendly today and will be in future as well. To work on your layout you should edit the basemod.css und content.css, that’s all.

Why blitzblank?

In addition to this already mentioned variety and quality of YAML, with the framework it is possible to create websites from “top-down” instead of “bottom-up”. As blitzblank is already a WordPress theme, you can create your WordPress themes with this top-down-mehthod as well. The amount of time for css-bugfixing will reduce to a minimum if not to zero. YAML-Layouts are also available for other Content-Management-Systems and Webshops. An YAML-expierenced developer won’t need much time to work himself into the code. The former versions of blitzblank (1.0, 1.1, 1.2) were used on lots of blogs. Anyway, in my opinion version 2 is much much better :-).

License

blitzblank merges YAML and WordPress, so you will have to pay attention to both licenses. WordPress is no problem anyway, but YAML calls for a link on your blog/website but offers other license modells, too, if a link is not possible or appropriate on your project. I ask for a link to this page, the theme page too. WordPress is also happy to get a link.

I placed the demanded links in the footer by default. I placed another link in it, the link to my personal website. You can delete this link of course if you like.

If there are problems with licensing, feel free to contact me - I will try to help.

Properties of blitzblank

• 3 column WordPress-Theme, the content column is in the middle of the screen but it is on the top in the source code.
• Theme is 960px wide. Within the website container relative units are used so you can increase the size of fonts, etc..
• Login-area is on the top in the right corner.
• Pages are listed as horizontal navigation elements.
• Text in the header-section is hidden but it is in the sourcecode.
• Print-CSS-Stylesheet for all pages and posts by default.
• Widgetized sidebars, although the theme could be used without widgets as well.
• Valid XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 2.1

Installation of blitzblank

• Download the theme file
• Unzip the file and put the file onto your webspace in your theme folder wordpress/wp-content/themes/
• Activate the theme in the backend
• Open the file header.php in the directory bb2en and customize it, put your blogname und authorname in it.
• Cut the favicon.ico file out of your bb2en directory and place it in your wordpress-root-directory (optional).
• Make a new header pic and place it in bb2en/css/screen/images and save it as “head.png” (optional).
• In bb2en/css/screen there are the already mentioned files “basemod.css” and “content.css” - here is the place for customizing the layout of your theme.

Changes to former versions (blitzblank 1.0, 1.1, 1.2)

• The width of the layout is set to 960 px. According to this decision it was possible to put the main content area on the top of the source code.
• The theme is not internationalized any more, so you have to decide to download the English or the German Theme Files. The lack of internationalising a theme was one reason that the release of blitzblank 2 took so long.
• Almost every file of blitzblank was rewritten. The comment area is redesigned. New templates were added. For example a 404.php, this file will be requested if a page cannot be found and there is an archive.php, this file will be requested if the user clicks on an archive-page. The necessary queries were in the header.php so these queries were made at each file requests as a part of the WordPress-Loop. Now the loop is in many files and is customized for each template.
• There are two templates for creating pages. By default there is the “page.php”, this file doesn’t show the comment-template. I met this decision, because now you can avoid an ugly message “No comments” and “Comments are closed” on all pages. If you want to allow comments, you can use the template “page_with_comments” (page_comments.php in your theme directory) and all will work.
• There is another template called “archives.php”. Write a page with it and there will be displayed a monthly archive, a category archive and a tag-cloud.
• The sidebar files where prepared for usage without using WordPress-Widgets.
• There are lots of comments in the files.
• The theme takes care of images and text. By default text is picking on images - that doesn’t look well. There are two classes “imagealignleft” and “imagealignright” to handle this. After including the image you add a class to it. Switch from “Visual” to “HTML” editing mode and you will see something like <img src=”… . Now you write your preferred class definiton before the “src”- attribut. It looks like this “<img class=”imagealignright” src=”… for an image which should be aligned right and <img class=”imagealignleft” src=”… for left aligned images.

Have fun with this theme and thanks in advance for your feedback!

Download

• blitzblank 2 - English version - last reviewed - 06-04-2008 - bb2en

Links with additional information

• blitzblank-Demo (German version of blitzblank)
• YAML-Online-Documentation
• YAML-Licenses
• Tutorial to make a new header - the shiny floor effect.”

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