As I stated earlier (although in german), I'm doing a complete rewrite of the Lush theme. Reasons are that the structure and stylesheet were taken exactly like in the Typo3 version, although the structure of WordPress (especially the sidebar) differs from that - it was a pain in the ass to even get the most simple widgets to work.
Also, people argued about the speed of Lush, and their absolutely right. It takes about 40 to 50 files for the front page, not including pictures and other media inserted via posts. More than 10 files have to be loaded even before the site can be displayed. There are already points I think I could improve this issue.
Nevertheless, I'll try to keep it as easy to modify as the original version, but keeping in mind that they were also some plugins which didn't worked correctly, I hereby ask you: What do you want in Lush? I mean, which plugins should Lush support correctly? Are there any other things you would like to see? What about WordPress Widgets?
So far, the list of plugins already requested (in no particular order):
- Optimal Title
- Subscribe To Comments
- Landing Sites
- Extended Live Archive
- Lightbox
- Time since
- FAlbum
- Ultimate Tag Warrior
- Gravatar
I will not promise to include all of them, but I'll do my best. Also, this doesn't mean that I'll bundle them with Lush, I'll only check that the latest version will work as expected.
September 8th:
I thought I'll give you a small update on the progress, so you don't have to wonder what's going on. As of now, the design is ready, along with the new structure for the sidebar to be more compatible with WordPress plugins. There are only minor visual differences in the browsers, most of the time it's just some extended margins between elements, nothing special. The dropping sidebar is hopefully fixed. The problem here is the the blockquote tag (I don't explain why), but as far as I can see from all my test postings, it is now much harder to break Lush's layout :-)
Most of the plugins mentioned above are already included. Apart from that, the configuration panel needs to be written, the theme needs to be made valid against XHTML 1.0 Strict and some minor things too. As I stated in the comments, I don't give a timeline, but a first release early next week seems realistic.
Again, if you think that something's still missing, just write a quick comment and I'll see what I can do.
September 11th: As far as I can tell, the theme should be finished this evening or early next morning. I would really appreciate it if there are some of you out there, who would like to thoroughly test it. You know, what's still missing, any bugs I haven't seen yet, the hopefully better speed, and especially the support for FAlbum and the design as seen in Safari (I don't trust at all). Just leave me a comment with a correct email adress and I'll send it to you.
Beta Version
There's a beta version available, grab it here (ZIP file, ~150kb). It still has some minor flaws, which I'm currently working on. But since you had enough patience with me, I thought, I'd throw it out, so you can test it. It will not overwrite any of Lush's original settings, so it's safe to run it on your own blog. You should grab the zip if you want to try out the admin functions, if everything works as you would expect it. I especially do need some input from FAlbum users, as I don't use flickr on my own.
There's also a test blog available over here with the theme activated. This is mainly for revealing any display or javascript errors, bugs, missing core functions etc.
You're welcome to check it out, but please give me some input, so I can make this theme as soon as possible a 2.0.
September 20th
New version ready. Grab it here.
