ElegantBlue Theme Released!

After days of work, and a couple of major and minor setbacks, I’m proud to announce my best, most feature-rich theme yet!

ElegantBlue was initially developed for my personal/religious blog, NathanRice.org, and after several requests to release the theme for public consumption, I began working on editing the theme for public release a little over a week ago.

It is a 2/3 column, option packed, wide content column, widgetized theme ready to use out of the box with no coding experience necessary. That’s right, there are several options that will help you customize this theme without ever touching a line of code!

Preview

ElegantBlue Preview

This theme features:

  • 2/3 column layout, with a right split sidebar (2 sidebars total)
  • Both sidebars are widgetized.
  • WordPress 2.3 compatibility, and backward compatibility for previous versions.
  • Tagging Support
  • Options to use either a graphical or text header
  • Theme Options that let you integrate your feedburner account information seamlessly!
  • Separated Comments and Trackbacks (thanks to this code)
  • Post Author Comment Highlighting

I’ve never spent more time and effort on a free theme release before, and you get to reap the benefits of all that hard work FOR FREE!!!

Download and Demo

Click here to Download ElegantBlue 1.1 (6963)
Click here to see a live demo of ElegantBlue

Upgrade

ElegantBlue has been upgraded to fix the trackback/comment count bug.
Click here to download the 1.1 Upgrade Package (1170)

Theme Updates

Occasionally, there will be a bug or two in my themes. I want to be sure that if I release a bug fix, you’re going to know that I’ve done so, so that you are able to upgrade as soon as possible. So, if you would either subscribe to my main RSS feed or input your email address in the form below, I can be sure that you’ll know when I release updates. BE SURE TO CHECK YOUR EMAIL AFTER YOU SUBMIT THE FORM AND VERIFY YOUR SUBSCRIPTION!

Enter your email address:

Please check your email after submitting and verify your subscription.

Installation

After you have downloaded the theme zip, unpack it and upload the entire ElegantBlue folder to your /wp-content/themes/ directory on your server.

Log into your wordpress dashboard and click on the “Presentation” tab. Look for the ElegantBlue theme in the list of available themes and click the image. This will activate the theme on your site.

Theme Options

I’ve included the option to customize the theme a little by using built in theme options. All you have to do is click on the “Presentation” tab in your WordPress dashboard, and activate ElegantBlue. After it has bee activated, you should see a new tab under “Presentation” called “Current Theme Options”. Click this tab. You should see two options below that you need to fill in if you wish to use them.

Feedburner Address:
This is the address you’ve set up in Feedburner to track your feed subscribers. It will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nathanricenet where “nathanricenet” is replaced by your unique feed address. Please copy everything into this box, including the “http://”. Once you have done this, click “Save Changes”.

Once this is done, there are several places where the defaul WordPress feed address will be replaced by your feedburner address. In the auto discovery code in the header, in the sidebar where the large feed icon is used, and at the end of single posts where readers are invited to subscribe to your feed.

Feedburner ID:
You may notice in the demo that there is a large section in the sidebar inviting readers to subscribe to my feed via email. By default, this option in ElegantBlue is turned off. To turn it on and get it working correctly, you’ll need to input your Feedburner ID into the second input box in the theme options page. To find your Feedburner ID, click to read this story. It explains everything from how to find your Feedburner address, to activating the feedburner email delivery service, to locating your feedburner ID.

Once you’ve entered your feedburner ID and clicked “Save Changes”, you should now see the large “subscribe via email” section in your sidebar. Also, at the end of each single post, the theme will invite the reader to subscribe to your feed via email.

The Header

I also included the ability for you to change the header from the default text header to a graphical header, without ever touching a line of code.

All you need to do is download the header_sample.png file I included in the theme’s images folder, use your favorite image editing program to insert text, images, or a logo, and save it back into the theme’s images folder as either header.jpg, header.gif, or header.png. Once you’ve done this (saved the image to the images folder on your server), the theme will automatically recognize the new header image and use it instead of the text header. If you want to revert back to the default, all you need to do is delete or rename the file.

Support

If you have support requests or bug reports, please use the comments of this post to let me know. Also, other users may be able to help you out as well. Harness the power of the community and surely someone will have a suggestion for you. I will certainly be active in the comments if you have any questions or comments.

Like This?

If you use this theme on your blog, and would like to say “thank you”, you’re more than welcome to donate a little cash to help cover the cost of hosting, time, labor, etc. It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice way to say “thanks!”.

Credits

I’m sure that I was inspired by a website design along the way somewhere, but I honestly don’t remember. I suck at design, so I rely heavily on the influences of others. Thanks to FamFamFam for the arrow icon, thanks to The Undersigned for the awesome code examples to include theme options with this theme, thanks to the guys who put together the feed icon “official pack”, thanks to a certain client who forced me to figure out how to separate trackbacks and comments, thanks to the readers of NathanRice.org for being a huge group of long-term beta-testers, and thanks to PHP for being such an awesome language and super easy to learn and use!

I ask that you do keep the author credits in the footer if it’s at all possible. If you need to remove them for some reason, please contact me. Please do not EVER remove the author credits in order to give credit to yourself. That’s just wrong.

164 Comments
  1. Lawrence Salberg

    Wow. Talk about coincidence. I spent the last few hours browsing the web for a theme that was kind of close to what I was looking for when I penned an article about how I’d be updating my blog soon. I wrote the article on July 31 on my blog and got around to it today finally.

    I happened across your blog for some other reason and thought, wow, this guy really has a nice look to his blog. Very readable. Then, I see you did your own theme – and that you are a Christian. Well, I’m implementing it now and should have it up by the time you see this.

    Last of all, I notice that you made this theme public today – the day I stumbled upon it. So, without further ado…. FIRST! (ha ha)

    October 1, 2007 at 6:28 pm Reply to this comment
  2. Nathan Rice

    Lawrence,
    I’m so glad everything worked out man! It looks so weird to have that theme (which was proprietary for a few months) on someone elses site. But dude, it looks great! I’m so glad you’re using it!

    If you don’t mind me asking, how did the install go? Did it all go well for you?

    Nathan

    October 2, 2007 at 5:16 pm Reply to this comment
  3. Lawrence Salberg

    It went great. I don’t think I’ve modified much yet. I also upgraded from WP 2.1 to 2.3 at the same time. So, the only issue I had was with a plugin – nothing to do with you. I also had a lot of static pages, so I had to modify the list to exclude only the ones I wanted at the head since my 15 static pages overwrote the whole header – ha ha. But it looks SO nice and clean — and very readable which was a must for me.

    The only other thing I did (that I can remember) was to add a width to the class that holds the slogan and lower the font size so my little dumb motto would wrap nicely and not intrude into my static buttons.

    I’ll be creating a repeating image of a piano keyboard (my baby) to go where the current header background is, so it’ll be interesting to see how I work around that. I might do a few other minor things, but I really like it just the way it is overall. The big subscribe options before the double sidebars begin are beautiful and just what I needed there. I’ve also modified a bit of the wording on a few areas and I’m sure that will continue. For instance, on the comment intro where it says folks can get an update delivered automatically each day… I took out the each day since in my wildest dreams I’ll never be able to post that often (ha ha)… little stuff like that.

    If you ever need any help on any projects, let me know. I’m happy to work with a Christian web guy who really KNOWS what they are doing. Quite frankly, and maybe I shouldn’t say this (ahem!), but I would have easily payed decent money for this because of all the time it saved me. But I know you did it for other reasons. I’m curious to see what your new blog will look like one day when everyone starts using your theme.

    October 2, 2007 at 9:33 pm Reply to this comment
  4. Shankar

    Nathan, this is a great theme, and thanks very much for sharing with all. I appreciate your effort behind this and in explaining the theme in detail.

    October 8, 2007 at 10:46 am Reply to this comment
  5. Nathan Rice

    Shankar,
    Not a problem at all! I’m glad to know you appreciate it!

    Nathan

    October 9, 2007 at 12:24 pm Reply to this comment
  6. Matej

    Nathan please, can you tell me how to change orange color at the top of the page with black one?

    I would say thanks for theme, but I already did by e-mail.

    October 10, 2007 at 2:38 pm Reply to this comment
  7. Mahmood Al-Yousif

    Very nice theme indeed. Thank you.

    I have found that the Metakeywords plugin (http://www.weinschenker.name/wptags-4-metakeywords) is incompatible with the theme as when it is activated, single articles cannot be viewed as it displays the “sorry no content…” error message.

    October 11, 2007 at 2:39 am Reply to this comment
  8. Vamsi

    Thats a pretty good theme.
    I like the minimizing of the more articles part.
    Good work.

    October 11, 2007 at 4:54 am Reply to this comment
  9. Big Dan

    Another awesome theme from Nathan Rice! I’m currently running your red theme, only changing to this one for the tag support. :)

    October 11, 2007 at 6:22 am Reply to this comment
  10. Nathan Rice

    @matej
    That’s a repeated background image. You’ll need to look for the body-bg file in the images folder and modify it. You’ll also probably want to change the border around the search box, which is done using a combination of CSS and a background image.

    @Mahmood
    Hmm, I’ll take a look into it. I’ll post theme updates here at the blog, so be sure to either subscribe to my feed, or subscribe to the theme updates email.

    @Vamsi
    Thanks for the thumbs up!

    @Big Dan
    Glad to hear it! Yeah, I really need to update RBR for tagging support.

    October 11, 2007 at 7:46 am Reply to this comment
  11. Tortuca

    Very nice, might use it for my political blog.

    October 11, 2007 at 11:15 am Reply to this comment
  12. dirk

    very, very nice theme. Thanks for it. I was looking for a new theme and found that after minutes andI loved it from the first one.
    Great work!

    October 11, 2007 at 1:49 pm Reply to this comment
  13. Matej

    Thank you Nathan, I’ll try it tommorrow…

    October 11, 2007 at 1:55 pm Reply to this comment
  14. Dan

    First of all thanks for a great theme. I’ve got it working on my site (with a few minor modifications) @ http://www.scruffydan.com/blog/ and I am very happy.

    I just have one small quibble with the theme. While trackbacks are sperated from comments the trackbaks are counted as comments in the post meta section.

    For example the post:
    http://www.scruffydan.com/blog/?p=958 has (at the time of this writing) has 4 comments and 1 trackback, yet the comment count is currently at 5 and the trackback count is at 0.

    Any Idea how to get the trackback counter working?

    Thanks
    Dan

    October 13, 2007 at 1:33 am Reply to this comment
  15. Steve Mills

    Nathan,

    I really love this theme. I’m changing from Cutline, which is very nice, as I prefer your approach.

    I particularly like the way you handle options that does not require code modifications.

    Is there a reasonably simple way to control how many articles are shown completely and those that are truncated?

    Thanks again for your fine efforts.

    Steve

    October 13, 2007 at 6:04 am Reply to this comment
  16. Nathan Rice

    @Dan
    That’s interesting. Let me check out my test installations and I’ll see if it’s a problem I can remedy.

    @Steve
    You know, I ALMOST included that as a theme options, but at the last minute decided not to do so. Obviously, that was a mistake. There is indeed an easy way to change the number of full articles, but you’d have to be comfortable with programming. If you are, take a look at the source of the index.php file and find the php code that controls the counter. More information on how I accomplished the effect, read this story:
    http://www.nathanrice.net/blog/3-ways-to-optimize-your-blog-homepage/ (section 2)

    Nathan

    October 13, 2007 at 9:14 am Reply to this comment
  17. Steve Mills

    Nathan,

    Thanks for the quick response to controlling the number of full and truncated posts.

    I’ve been around a long time ( nice way of saying I’m OLD) and PHP is still new to me – give me Turbo Pascal and I cook! Anyway, the change, as you suggested, was simple. Your code is very clear.

    On a site like mine with many short posts, I felt showing a few more full posts made sense.

    At some point I would be interested in hearing the 2 post rationale in the referenced article.

    Again, thanks for a terrific theme.

    Steve

    October 13, 2007 at 11:54 am Reply to this comment
  18. Scott

    Hey Nathan!

    Great theme! I just installed it and read through the comments and found between your documentation and the comments I was able to get all my questions answered.

    Thanks for putting the theme out there. I love it!

    God Bless!!!

    Scott White
    Scott’s Morning Brew

    October 14, 2007 at 9:31 am Reply to this comment
  19. Thank you!

    Just dropped a couple of sheckles your way. Thanks for the GREAT theme!

    October 14, 2007 at 12:26 pm Reply to this comment
  20. Scott

    I am running into the same thing as Dan above. With the post: http://morningbrew.sdwhiteonline.com/2007/10/12/regent-university-squelching-students-and-its-wrong/

    It has 7 comments and 1 trackback but is showing 8 comments.

    It’s minor, VERY minor but…

    If you need access to the admin area on my blog let me know…

    Scott

    October 14, 2007 at 2:55 pm Reply to this comment
  21. Lawrence Salberg

    I’ve had the theme up for a few weeks and thought I’d give some further thoughts.

    First, to change the number of articles shown (which seems to be common interest here), edit index.php (in the theme) and look for the following around line 12:

    <?php if($i <= 2) { ?>

    Change the 2 to the number of articles you do want to display.

    Then look further down to about line 31 for the following two lines:


    <?php } elseif ($i >= 3) { ?>
    <?php if($i == 3) { ?>

    Change the 3 to the number of articles you want to display plus one. That’s it.

    One reason I went with this theme was because of the emphasis on signups and RSS feeds and its nicely-built integration with Feedburner which I had already been using for almost two years. Since adding this theme, my subscriptions doubled, so it is doing it’s job very well.

    Also, I had a lot of static pages which by the theme’s default will try to appear as the blue-ish gradient buttons in the head banner. For me, they ran all over the place. To limit those to only the ones you want to display, just modify the wp_list_pages command around line 45 of the header.php file to exclude the pages you don’t want to display in the header. You can find out how to use that function at the wordpress.org website.

    The only other thing I think that might cause some doubt for potential converters is the thinness of the two sidebar columns. If you look at my blog, you’ll see how I’ve added more content in the wider area below the subscription options before the two thinner columns start. I needed that because of my concern over the readability of those two items at the thinner columns. Of course, I also love the thinner columns which is great for link lists, blogrolls, etc. You can add a new widget area to the theme very easily (as you can with most themes) and then populate that new area with any number of widgets that you require. You might have to class them differently, so if you aren’t comfortable with CSS it may take a bit longer, but it isn’t hard to do by any means if you take a stab at it. If Nathan updates the theme, I’d recommend that as a new widget area built-in for people less comfortable with straightforward code, but even without it, this is still the best WP theme I’ve ever found (in terms of usability and functionality).

    Now that everyone is jumping on board, I’ll probably modify my colors and header a bit so we all don’t look alike, so give me a week and stop by to see what changes are possible with this theme. But give Nathan credit – he did all the hard work here and I have a feeling he truly understands the daily/weekly needs of bloggers to get their message out and not be distracted by the idiosyncrasies of some of the themes out there.

    October 14, 2007 at 3:02 pm Reply to this comment
  22. Lawrence Salberg

    Grrr… my code was destroyed above. Forgot to use the code tags….

    Line 12 reads:

    <?php if($i <= 2) { ?>

    And lines 31 through 33 read:

    <?php } elseif ($i >= 3) { ?>
    <?php if($i == 3) { ?>

    Hope that sticks this time.

    October 14, 2007 at 3:06 pm Reply to this comment
  23. Nathan Rice

    Lawrence,
    I fixed the code. For some reason, WP doesn’t like commenters submitting code. Oh well.

    Thanks a lot for helping out with this. I’m sure there will be a lot of people who will want to change the number of articles displayed in full. I should have recognized that before hand and made it a theme option like the feedburner stuff.

    BTW, I had the same experience as you with feed subscriptions. When I put the theme on my site (before I released it to the public), I saw a 30% increase in subscribers. That’s exactly what I designed the theme for … to encourage subscriptions, and it works like a charm for that.

    October 14, 2007 at 9:04 pm Reply to this comment
  24. Steve Mills

    Nathan,

    A wart – I think – and a question.

    If you look under “Leave a comment” in a full post we seem to be getting code rather than interpreted output. This is true on the 3 sites I checked, including your demo site.

    The question – maybe this was a design decision – on the main index page there’s no obvious way to leave a comment on the full posts. At least as far as I can tell. You can, of course, get there by clicking the “Comments” link or going to the single post page, but I would think this is possible confusing.

    Am I missing something?

    Thanks again for all your hard work….
    Steve

    October 14, 2007 at 10:16 pm Reply to this comment
  25. Dirk

    Using this theme since tonite, thanks so far :).

    One thing struck me, there are comments and trackbacks missing for full pages. If you look at http://www.dhaunsch.com/filmratselstockchen/ for example there are, err, should be more that 30 comments. Where can I fix this?

    October 15, 2007 at 12:06 am Reply to this comment
  26. Evert Jan

    @Dirk:
    If you want comments on pages, you need to insert this hook in page.php (somewhere below the content hook):

    <?php comments_template(); ?>

    October 15, 2007 at 1:33 am Reply to this comment
  27. Dirk

    @Evert Jan: Perfect, tnx a lot.

    October 15, 2007 at 1:44 am Reply to this comment
  28. Scott

    Steve, are you talking about the code that defines what HTML you are allowed to use? That is supposed to be there…

    October 15, 2007 at 9:42 am Reply to this comment
  29. Nathan Rice

    @Evert Jan,
    WOW! Just as I’m about to answer him, you stepped up and handled it for me!

    You guys are the best!

    @Scott
    Indeed, that is the “allowed code” section. It can easily be removed in the comments.php file, but I think it’s a handy reminder for your users. Thanks for handling this question for me as well!

    October 15, 2007 at 10:30 am Reply to this comment
  30. Nathan Rice

    By the way, guys and gals, I’m looking into the trackback/comment problem. I may end up having to update the theme. The code I modified and used to do the separation is here:
    http://mk.netgenes.org/wiki/Trackping_Separator

    And I used the method of including the plugin with the theme that I wrote about here:
    http://tinyurl.com/3c5yp3

    Nathan

    October 15, 2007 at 10:35 am Reply to this comment
  31. Steve Mills

    Scott: You’re right – just a total misread on my part.

    I’m still confused on the other issue though. I understand how to add comments to pages thanks to these posts, but I’m still wondering about the “Front page”.

    Maybe my perspective is affected by what I’ve been used to, but it seems a little confusing to not allow comments directly under the full posts. Is this possible and does it make sense?

    Thanks…..
    Steve

    October 15, 2007 at 1:12 pm Reply to this comment
  32. Nathan Rice

    Steve,
    As far as I’m concerned, I have never heard of including the comments on the front page below each article. In fact, I’ve never even seen it suggested.

    Now, I AM familiar with putting a link to the comments under each post, taking you to that post’s single post page where the comments are displayed, but nothing more than that.

    Hope that helps!
    Nathan

    October 15, 2007 at 2:39 pm Reply to this comment
  33. Scott

    No problem Nathan, I hope I didn’t step on any toes. :) As far as the Comments/Trackback/Ping issue, I will gladly wait patiently for it. This theme is awesome!

    October 15, 2007 at 4:25 pm Reply to this comment
  34. ScruffyDan

    Quick suggestion for you Nathan:

    since some of us have modified the theme to suit our needs, it would be much appreciated if when you fic the traceback issue you relase a list of changes to the code, so that we may simply implement those changes in our modified theme, instead of having to re-modify the new updated version.

    Anyways thanks again for the great theme.

    October 15, 2007 at 4:33 pm Reply to this comment
  35. Nathan Rice

    @Scott
    Not a problem at all! I’m glad to have the help!

    @ScruffyDan
    I definitely plan on releasing an “upgrade package” as well as updating the theme. The upgrade package will include instructions for upgrading yourself. (that is, if I can figure out what the problem is)

    Nathan

    October 16, 2007 at 11:18 am Reply to this comment
  36. Steve Mills

    After a couple of dumb posts on my part – sorry fellers – I have another question.

    One reader wrote today and said the comment link wasn’t working. I think I see why he said that.

    The 1st post on my page was over a screen long and had no comments. When you clicked the comments link nothing “appeared” to happen. Actually it did, but it was at the bottom. Is there possibly an anchor tag missing or is this the proper reaction?

    Once a comment is added, clicking the “comment” link brings up the proper page and focuses on the comment area.

    Thanks for any help / understanding.

    Steve

    October 17, 2007 at 6:39 am Reply to this comment
  37. Veidit

    Hello

    Thanks for a great theme, I implemented it on my site but I have one problem:
    If you look here http://nudelsoppa.se/date/2007/09/ There are no links in the text, but if you look at an individual post I can see links in the text: http://nudelsoppa.se/blandat/hemmet/137/utrustning-for-hemmet/
    And yes it’s in Swedish so just replace all the text with “Bork, bork, bork”

    October 17, 2007 at 9:34 am Reply to this comment
  38. Steve Mills

    @Veidit

    I’m a relative WP newbie, but I did see this on the web:

    ——————————

    That’s a wordpress issue. Formatting doesn’t work in the excerpt that is displayed when you use the “more” feature. Links, line breaks, none of it will work.

    However, if you change “the content” to “the excerpt” (see wordpress codex for more on this) then you can have your pages display whatever you type in the “optional excerpt” section of your post.

    —————————————–

    I don’t know if this is your issue, but thought I would pass it along.

    SM

    October 18, 2007 at 6:23 am Reply to this comment
  39. Nathan Rice

    @Veidit

    Steve is correct … either insert some text in the “optional excerpt” field of your “write post” page, or look in the archive.php file and find the place where it says “the_excerpt”. Change it to “the_content” and it will display the full post, including formatting.

    Thanks!
    Nathan

    October 18, 2007 at 11:06 am Reply to this comment
  40. Mike

    great theme! i really like the design and colors, using it on my blog now :)

    October 18, 2007 at 1:15 pm Reply to this comment
  41. Veidit

    An option for using Gravatars in this theme would be great, or if anyone feels like it, instructions on where to enter the needed code?

    October 22, 2007 at 5:36 am Reply to this comment
  42. Dirk

    @Veidit: I use Gravatars with the Gravatars2 plugin.

    http://zenpax.com/gravatars2/

    I did the adaption to the theme myself. Would highly appreciate, if Nathan could implement support for this, still looks a bit “blocky”. :)

    October 22, 2007 at 5:42 am Reply to this comment
  43. Evert Jan

    I’m using MBLA, which combines Gravatar with MyBlogLog avatars. Instructions can be found somewhere on that site.

    Look at my blog to see how it can look with this theme.

    Regards,
    EJ

    October 22, 2007 at 7:34 am Reply to this comment
  44. Nathan Rice

    Veidit and Dirk,
    I can’t promise anything, but if I did integrate avatars (either MBL or gravatars), how would you like them styled? I’m thinking maybe inside the comment box with the text wrapped around the image. Would that look good to you guys? What about maybe putting them in the blue meta section underneath the comment, floated to the right?

    Thoughts anyone?

    October 23, 2007 at 7:17 am Reply to this comment
  45. Dirk

    @Nathan: Look here how it looks on my blog:
    http://www.dhaunsch.com/2007/10/23/der-praktikant-teil-2
    It would be cooler if the pics were inside the box, above the blue, but inside the white space. And neatly sized of course. Thanks for thinking it through.

    October 23, 2007 at 8:18 am Reply to this comment
  46. liorry

    Great theme, using it in it’s hebrew version, a little color modified by me.
    Thank you!

    October 23, 2007 at 8:35 am Reply to this comment
  47. Veidit

    I would say to the upper right in the comment. Also the option to choose a default image when users that dosn’t have a gravatar posts a comment.

    October 24, 2007 at 8:37 am Reply to this comment
  48. Nathan Rice

    Guys,
    FYI, I did fix the comment/trackback count bug, and it should be working now.

    Click Here to see the demo
    Click Here to see the upgrade announcement page to download the upgrade package.

    October 24, 2007 at 12:52 pm Reply to this comment
  49. ScruffyDan

    Thanks for the fix. it works perfectly… so far:)

    October 24, 2007 at 3:51 pm Reply to this comment
  50. Dirk

    Works over here,too. As expected. Thanks for the fix.

    October 24, 2007 at 9:53 pm Reply to this comment
  51. frankeyboard

    Hi Nathan, maybe this is a stupid question but anyway, is it possible to use this theme on my blog hosted on wordpress (mysite.wordpress.com)?

    October 25, 2007 at 6:53 am Reply to this comment
  52. Nathan Rice

    @franky
    Unless you know some people can can pull some strings, WordPress.com only allows you to use the theme they have for you to choose from. I’d LOVE to be able to have EB available for WP.com users, but as of right now, I have no idea how to get my themes put up for use by WP.com members.

    Nathan

    October 25, 2007 at 7:00 am Reply to this comment
  53. frankeyboard

    What a pity… thank you anyway!

    October 25, 2007 at 7:32 am Reply to this comment
  54. Scott

    Nathan…

    Take a look here…

    http://www.sdwhiteonline.com/brew_images/ScreenShot004.jpg

    The right hand sidebar has a limited length? Anything I add beyond what is there on the page now gets monkeyed up and looks like the screen shot…

    October 26, 2007 at 4:16 am Reply to this comment
  55. Lawrence Salberg

    Scott: There is no limit to the length of a column. What’s happening is that your Duncan for President ad is 184px wide and the left column width is defined as 160px wide, so your ad is creating empty space between the columns which is allowing some of your other content to sneak up into the gap. The reason all the content doesn’t sneak up in there is because of the way in which it is displayed (i.e. ul’s vs. li’s vs. inline vs. floated, etc). I’m not sure which Recent Posts plugin you are using, but you may be able to change the way in which it is displayed so it matches the other content. However, I’d of course reduce my images to fit within the defined widths of the column. You are going to have cross-browser inconsistencies any time that happens no matter what you do with the Recent Posts plugin. The coffeecup image is also too big (164px). Don’t forget to allow for any built in padding for these images, too. I recommend using the Firebug add-on for Firefox whenever you have problems like this with a dynamic site.

    October 26, 2007 at 6:11 am Reply to this comment
  56. Scott White

    Thanks Lawrence! I will take care of my coffee cup and my Duncan Hunter images. I appreciate the help!

    October 26, 2007 at 6:23 am Reply to this comment
  57. Scott White

    Uh… nope. Didn’t fix it. I went through all my stuff and everything is either dynamic or within 155 PX wide. Still doing it. Help??? :)

    October 26, 2007 at 6:58 am Reply to this comment
  58. Scott White

    I found the culprit… it was a search script widget… fixed…

    October 26, 2007 at 7:13 am Reply to this comment
  59. Steve Mills

    Thanks for the fixes – seem to work well for me.

    I’m still messing with the comments link.

    e.g. if you go to the demo site and click the Comments link on the second post (Another Test Post)it links to a “comments” anchor which I don’t believe is there.

    Am I missing something? I’ve been playing with the code to add it, but am always hesitant to do so.

    Thanks…..
    Steve

    October 26, 2007 at 7:20 am Reply to this comment
  60. Nathan Rice

    Steve,
    When there aren’t any comments, then the #comments anchor doesn’t show up. Should it?

    Nathan

    October 26, 2007 at 7:45 am Reply to this comment
  61. Bucky

    Lovin’ this theme!

    Works well with the “sexy comments” plugin also.

    See comments section for visual:

    http://www.bloggingwv.com/sometimes-the-cc-just-writes-itself/#comments

    December 6, 2007 at 8:34 am Reply to this comment
  62. Hozay

    The site’s still really rough but after looking at zillion themes, my partner and I have settled on Elegant Blue for our new business. Thanks, Nathan!

    My (first) question concerns image classes. Does the theme use them and if so, what are they?

    Thanks,

    Joe

    December 18, 2007 at 7:48 pm Reply to this comment
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  65. Myrna the Minx

    Using your super theme on two sites and am wondering if you know how to change the spacing for the Sociable plugin. For some reason, your theme adds a lot of space between options and I’d like to change that because the current spacing clutters up the page a bit.

    http://www.renodiscontent.com

    Thanks again!

    December 25, 2007 at 7:30 pm Reply to this comment
  66. zach

    Thanks for theme. I want to add background color/image, like this http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/4964/elegantblueweber6.jpg

    Is it possible?

    thanks

  67. BW

    Great theme – just implemented it on my blog.

    With regards to IE6

    When I have a post that has 2 or more comments then the headings ‘Comment’ and ‘Leave a Comment’ and there associated text below are shifted to the left (characters are cut off or missing’. You can see an example here
    http://www.visit-the-coqui.com/2007/09/see-old-san-juan%e2%80%99s-historic-sights-with-a-ranger/

    Do you have any idea why this is happening?

    It is fine in FF

    Thanks

    January 3, 2008 at 6:28 am Reply to this comment
  68. shoban

    Hi
    Thanks u so much the for the theme..It looks great.. I am having one issue with it..

    Comments are not being displayed properly for some pages. any idea?

    I installed ur upgraded version too.

    Shoban

    January 27, 2008 at 2:01 am Reply to this comment
  69. Avi FB

    Hi there,
    Thank you for a great theme.
    I have one question tho, how do I let MORE THAN TWO POSTS be shown at once?

    Thank you again!

    February 5, 2008 at 12:49 pm Reply to this comment
  70. Alex

    Hello,

    I have just started my online album and am happy to say that I like this theme for the allround good looks and style. Did not discover yet the customization advantages, but I’m struggling with it all…

    I have two questions, I hope you could advise me:

    1. How can I remove from the top-right corner the “Subscribe via RSS” area? My viewers are close friends, they will gladly subscribe via email, not soon via RSS. I have to say I am not a programming guru, so detailed instructions (if necessary) will be highly appreciated.

    2. Main Page displays first 2 articles in full and the rest by title. I found the article on how to expand the list to 3-5-7 full articles, but to be honest I am more interested if it is possible to have only 1-2 full articles and ALL the rest to appear as a summary, with 30-50 words of text under the title. To make myself better understood, I would liek to have on the homepage the same architecture as the one I get when clicking on “Archive”.

    Cheers,
    Alex

    February 14, 2008 at 2:28 am Reply to this comment
  71. Michelle

    just wanted to say this theme rocks I have it up and running on my blog with a few modifications to it so that it matches the Pixelpost theme I am using so that my site is in sync I absolutely love it makes for a very professional look. Feel free to check it out @ http://thedigipix.com

    February 20, 2008 at 8:45 am Reply to this comment
  72. Alex

    I solved the first issue I had (described above), but I am still stuck with teh second one. Any ideas?

    P.S. Many viewers appreciated this theme, I am happy I discovered it.

    February 21, 2008 at 1:56 am Reply to this comment
  73. jan

    Thanks for this very “straight” theme, I use it with a German translation at

    http://m2m-blog.de.

    Regards
    Jan

    March 3, 2008 at 1:22 am Reply to this comment
  74. Hallenbrand

    Dear Nathan,

    I love this theme, I modified it a little, so it would fit my needs perfectly. And I really love it.

    My question is if this theme is Wordpress 2.5 compatible. If it isn’t maybe you could indicate me which changes I have to make so I can use it with the new version of Wordpress which will be released on the 28th.

    Or maybe you release a modified version so the theme can be used with the newest version of Wordpress.

    Well, thank you in advanced.

    March 5, 2008 at 3:52 am Reply to this comment
  75. Made Sariada

    What a nice theme and will use it in my blog, http://www.madesariada.com

    Thanks for your great work.

    March 11, 2008 at 8:17 pm Reply to this comment
  76. Alison

    thanks for a great theme!

    March 20, 2008 at 2:01 am Reply to this comment
  77. ?ukasz

    I can’t download theme ElegantBlue . Can someone send me this theme by e-mail. My email is:
    lukas[at]cookee.biz

    May 20, 2008 at 5:54 am Reply to this comment
  78. Lola

    Hi Nathan
    I’m using your theme and it’s great. One question – how do I turn off the link description that it only appears when someone hovers over the link and not underneath the link itself? thanks! keep up the good work.

    June 29, 2008 at 9:40 am Reply to this comment
  79. Lawrence Salberg

    Nathan is off getting married and enjoying his honeymoon and all that jazz. Let me see if I can answer a few of these in his stead until the master Jedi returns.

    @Alex: This is kind of old by now, but did you get your problem solved? I looked at the link to your name and it didn’t look like it, but wasn’t sure if you meant a different blog or just changed your mind. You can contact me if you are still working on it. If I understand you, you want two articles in full on the home page, followed by links to summary articles, and then on subsequent pages, you just only want summaries and not full articles? Is that right?

    @Hallenbrand: Yes, the theme is compatible with WP 2.5 and 2.5.1. No mods needed.

    @Lukasz: Download is working just fine now. Try it again. If you still have trouble, email me privately (link above) and I’ll email the theme to you. It’s only 170Kb or so.

    @Lola: Didn’t see a link to your site. But I’m guessing you mean the blogroll in the right column? You’ll need to edit r_sidebar.php in your theme editor.

    Around line 18 is the following PHP code:

    get_links(-1, ”, ”, ‘ – ‘);

    See the guide to using the get_links command and how it can be customized here.

    Suffice to say, just to make that change, you’ll need to change the setting for show_description to FALSE. Nathan left it at the default setting of TRUE by not setting it, so you’ll need to add a few commas and add it in.

    However, as long as you are changing it, you might want to update it (assuming you are running the latest version of WP) to the newer command wp_list_bookmarks. I imagine Nathan will eventually update the theme to remove some of the deprecated commands before the stop working in WP, but if you’ve begun to do a lot of customization to your theme, you’d be better off learning and making the changes yourself, else all your changes will revert to his exact look once he updates the theme.

    July 2, 2008 at 12:27 pm Reply to this comment
  80. Jalal

    Your theme translated to Farsi language. Thank you.

    July 3, 2008 at 8:56 am Reply to this comment
  81. Lola

    Thanks Nathan… I managed to figure it out.

    July 3, 2008 at 1:45 pm Reply to this comment
  82. Danilo

    Hi Nathan

    the Elegantblue has big problems with version 2.6 of wordPress.

    You need to work to upgrade ;-)

    thanks

    July 17, 2008 at 5:09 pm Reply to this comment
  83. Nathan Rice

    @Danilo:
    Can you explain the problems to me? I just downloaded 2.6 for my local server, and am about to test it, but Matt said there is no difference between 2.5 and 2.6 for themes. Does it have to do with the theme options panel?

    July 17, 2008 at 5:16 pm Reply to this comment
  84. Adonis

    Great theme Nathan! Using it right now!

    August 24, 2008 at 7:46 pm Reply to this comment
  85. myrnatheminx

    I need to figure out how to add a 728×90 banner ad to my site that uses ElegantBlue or I’m going to have to switch themes. Every time I try to add my ad code into the header or even above the loop in the index and single post files, the sidebar busts. I removed the search bar in the process as well in hopes that that would help. No dice. Wish I was a programmer! Help if you can–I would love to keep the theme. Thanks (www.renodiscontent.com)

  86. wayan bali

    I did download nathanble111 but how to install it? sorry really newbie

    October 20, 2008 at 2:00 am Reply to this comment
  87. Chuckypita

    Awesome updates with Elegant Blue. Very impressive! I never thought I’d look away from the I-Theme I’m currently using, but this gave me some great ideas.

    October 26, 2008 at 7:35 pm Reply to this comment
  88. Brad

    Nathan

    I like the theme a lot. Its really clean looking. I’ll probably change the colors when I get around to it so ours don’t look exactly alike.

    Anyways, have you ever made a bbpress theme? It would be cool to see a bbpress theme similar to the ElegantBlue theme.

  89. aqiz

    I really like this theme because it was so easy and simple to use.

    February 10, 2009 at 7:18 am Reply to this comment
  90. Rachmat

    thanks for you

    February 10, 2009 at 9:17 am Reply to this comment
  91. Doni

    Hello Nathan Rice

    I Really Like This Theme, Because its Simple And Beautiful

    I Want To Ask This, Do U Have The Elegant Blue Theme With Only 2 Gridline?

    Thank You

    February 26, 2009 at 9:16 am Reply to this comment
  92. Reese

    It’s nice theme. Does the theme works with IE6? thanks.

    March 19, 2009 at 3:34 am Reply to this comment
  93. Panca

    Great…. really luv this themes…

    April 19, 2009 at 10:58 pm Reply to this comment
  94. Joko Susilo

    Awesome! ElegantBlue is a great theme.

    May 14, 2009 at 7:14 am Reply to this comment
  95. Flooring

    Looks nice and elegant.
    Do you design wordpress themes and then sell them to potential clients?

    May 31, 2009 at 7:10 pm Reply to this comment
  96. Aldo

    Hi Nathan ,

    Love your designs. I was wondering how I can upload your template so that I can use it for my blogger account?

    Thanks
    Aldo

    June 9, 2009 at 2:32 pm Reply to this comment
  97. Eko Sukmo

    Nice template, & elegant…great job…..

    June 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Reply to this comment
  98. Info Kesehatan

    Nice template. thanks to share

    June 29, 2009 at 11:36 pm Reply to this comment
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