Layers theme screenshots

The brand new version of ‘Layers’ gets you an admin panel to quickly change its settings with a few clicks. You can also use alternate style sheet now. This version gives you the gift of the elegent bright skin along with the legacy dark shine. Again, a few clicks are enough to change this look.

You also don’t need to put any extra effort to check this site manually for updates. This is gracefully integrated into the admin panel of the theme, which checks for a new release once every seven days.

You can download the brand new version here.

If you didn’t know about microformats

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated as uF is a web-based approach to semantic markup that seeks to re-use existing XHTML and HTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes. This approach allows information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

-wikipedia

In a bit more simpler meaning, if you have a software which can understand a web page written with microformat, it would be possible for the software to automatically recognize the informations like, contact information, geometric information, bookmarks etc.

If it is still not very clear, what will extra benefit will you get from it, just try operator firefox addon once with Layers theme. The theme uses hatom, hcard, XFN, rel-home, xFolk microformats.

The article by otto helped a lot for this update.

No doubt, I love WordPress.

Whenever I went to wordpress.org, I was always wondering why there is no theme tab under the extend wordpress titled page. Now, this requirement has been fulfilled by the good wordpress guys. The user doesn’t have to go under the subversion details too, just one has to register for a new account on wordpress.org (great if you are already having that) and upload it with a few requirements.

The requirements are:

1. A single zip file, with all of the files themes file included.
2. There must be a style.css file containing:
   1. Name (which must be unique to the directory)
   2. Tags
   3. Version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and must be unique to the theme)
   4. Align classes: .alignright, .alignleft, .aligncenter (see http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS for more details)
3. The screenshot file name must be screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen.
4. Licensing must be GPL compatible.
5. No hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.
6. The theme must be your own original work.
7. Adult/mature themes are not allowed.

That looks fine, ( Well I initially released my first theme under the same license which this site is ).

So now we have a central repository of well reviewed themes on this directory. Cheers for that!

1. GPL
2. Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License

On freenode #cc channel bringatowel helped me solve some of my confusions about creative commons licensing. So things are quite clear in my mind now.

Creative Commons is working with IIT Bombay to create India jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. Porting of the version 2.5 documents is completed.

As written on gnu.org about Creative Commons

This is a copyleft free license that is good for artistic and entertainment works, and educational works. Please don’t use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.

GPL could also work well, but as the design and theme creation is more towards art I am going to consider Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. The attribution clause of creative commons looks interesting.

Also mentioned on the same page

Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” is to leave the principal questions about the work’s licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to highlight the substance of the license choices. And if someone proposes to “use a Creative Commons license” for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately, “Which one?”

So I am being specific over here. We have an answer to “which one?”

UPDATE :

After the introduction of new wordpress theme directory, i am thinking about changing the license to GPL. Now that looks sensible!

Logging in

After logging in to your sourceforge account, go to the concerned project page, which will be something like this [http://sourceforge.net/projects/wordmint]

Database Setup

Wordpress requires MySQL database management system for it’s beck-end as it stores all the CONTENT of it’s pages in the database. So we have to get that database setup first.

To set it up, in the admin menu click on Shell/DB/Web. This page contains wealth of information about your Database, Web services and shell. There in the Database Service heading click on Manage Project Databases link. ( If you already have setup a database, in that case the password for all the users will be visible in plain text, so be aware of this fact ). The project databases are not activated by default, they are activated only after you set password for different user permission sets. So set passwords for all the three users listed there.

Wait for sometime and the databases will be active. Keep the username admin and it’s password noted or remember.

On the same page, the phpmyadmin URL would be listed. Press your left mouse button over it. It should lead you to a username password authentification dialogue. Enter your admin username and it’s password. If you have entered the username and password correctly, then you should be taken to the phpmyadmin welcome page.

Delete the three dots ( … ) after the underscore ( _ ) in the Create new database entry cell and replace them with your database name. say ‘blog’, write it there and click on create.

WordPress download and upload on the web server

After setting up the database, download the latest version of WordPress from ‘http://wordpress.org/download/’

To transfer the file to the web server, we can use any of the methods described in file transfers page on the sourceforge wiki. I personally use sftp method. In case of windows Win-SCP is a good GUI client. Upload the zipped folder to the /home/groups/P/PR/PROJECT_NAME/htdocs/ directory. Here P and PR represent first and first two letters of your project unix name. PROJECT_NAME is your project’s unix name.

After uploading the zipped folder, uncompress it there using shell. Now the blog address would be http://projectname.sourceforge.net/wordpress. You could also change the folder name ‘wordpress’ to something else.If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://projectname.sourceforge.net/), move all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the htdocs directory.

Configuring WordPress

Inside the wordpress folder find the wp-config-sample.php file. Edit it as described below and rename it to wp-config.php// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
As commented in the code, first replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with your database name which you created in phpmyadmin. (e.g. pr229903_blog ). Then enter the admin username as was listed on the “Shell/DB/Web” admin page of sourceforge. Now enter the password for the same account and leave the database host to the default value.

The Final Steps

After completing all the above steps, enter the installation address in your web browser’s address bar. e.g. http://projectname.sourceforge.net/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php or http://projectname.sourceforge.net/wp-admin/install.php (in case all the files and folders were moved to the htdocs folder of the web server ).

That’s it!!! WordPress should now be installed. At the end of the installation it will give you a login and a random password. The password is random, so be sure to write it down or at least copy and paste it. Once you’re logged in you can change the password.

This is my first post to my all-new blog with a fresh theme applied — Layers! I should have started with this blog-cum-portfolio way before but I just wanted to get it into my own style. After diving into the wordpress template tags and theming structure, it was not a big deal to apply my layout on wordpress. Thanks a ton wordpress guys.

As for now, Layers is in it’s developmental version, i’ll soon be uploading it for public release. So wait a few more days!!! I’ll keep on writing….