March 17th, 2007

The Skittlish Theme for Wordpress

I spent all day Saturday glued to the NCAA Basketball tournament but required something to fiddle with during the down times. So I dusted off an old theme I started porting to Wordpress long ago and finished a first version of it.

Skittlish Screenshot

The theme is called Skittlish. It was created by Cristi Balan for Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails weblog publishing system. Cristi deserves the vast majority of credit and love for this theme. I simply threw some Wordpress guts into it. I was a bit unsure if it was kosher to port Skittlish as I couldn’t find a license for it, but after a couple of failed attempts to contact Cristi I went ahead and ported the sucker. Cristi is supportive of the effort.

Skittlish should work with Wordpress 2.0 and above.

Updated [April 14th. 2008]: I completed a pretty big refresh of Skittlish. Should work great with 2.5 now. Read through the stylesheet as I included a bunch of comments. Should be easier to read and tweak now. Let me know if/when you hit the bugs

Updated [June 9th. 2007]: I spent a few moments and validated the theme. It wasn’t much. It should validate now. Let me know otherwise. I also fixed the two versions at the same number. They’re pretty much identical except one has widgets and the other doesn’t.

Updated [May 22nd. 2007]: Mario sent in his latest version of widgets. We’ve taken the beta label off and will let Skittlish rest on 1.05 for now. Let us know if there’s any bugs.

Updated [May 13th, 2007]: Skittlish now has widgets because of the awesome Mario García. He put them into Skittlish. I really had nothing to do with it. For now we’ll slap beta on the Skittlish Widget version. Please let me, or Mario, know of any problems, or suggestions, in the comments, or by email. Again, much love to Mario. Why not drop by his site, and give him some love and thanks.

Updated [March 20th, 2007]:: Apparently this was a pretty easy one, thankfully, and was my oversight to begin with so my apologies to all. If a black background in IE appears when you use Skittlish then either re-download the updated zip file (version 1.02) or, probably much easier, open your Skittlish header.php and look at lines 12-14. There’s a IE conditional there and if you make the link path to the base_ie.css absolute (http://YOUR-SITE-URL/wp-content/themes/skittlish/base_ie.css) it will eradicate that nasty black hole eating your Skittlish theme.

Much love to Wendy @ Things in Your Head for pointing out the IE problem in the first place. Wendy’s a fine example of someone you want visiting your site. I would have never know this was an issue if not for her comment so a big thanks Wendy.

Updated [March 20th]: Thanks to a comment from Wendy it appears there is a problem with Skittlish Wordpress in IE. I was afraid of this. Since I do not have access to IE, total Mac-head, my ability to problem solve this is limited. Not to mention I’m no code Jedi to begin with so even if I did have IE I still might not solve the problem. If anyone has the same problem as Wendy and has a fix please speak up for the benefit of any current or future users of Skittlish. I’ll attempt to rummage around in the meantime for a fix.

Skittlish is a fun, candy colored theme with seven color options. In addition, it has options for fluid or fixed widths. It is hatom supported and I put in some styling for an OpenID login form. I used Christian Montoya’s great comment.php template for the comment section. It also supports the following plugins:

  • Ultimate Tag Warrior Support for native WordPress tags now
  • Yet Another Related WordPress Plugin
  • Gravatars Support for native WordPress gravatars now
  • Recent Comments

The above plugins do not have to be installed but their functions are supported. Though it’s probably obvious, I’ll still mention the fact that I had nothing to do with the creation of these plugins. All respect and credit should go to their respective authors.

Install Skittlish like any other Wordpress theme. It should work right out of the box. I didn’t do a thorough testing of it but did put Skittlish through some paces on the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Flock, Camino, OmniWeb, and Opera. Seems to work fine in all these browsers. How it renders in Internet Explorer I have no idea. I’d imagine badly but this is just me being pessimistic. Could do fine.

I welcome any suggestions, comments or bug reports you may have. I’ll do my best to support this theme but, please, keep in mind I’m no Wordpress wizard and this is a first release. There’s also plenty of people who are more knowledgeable and experienced than me. Chances are you’re one of them. So feel free to chime in.

And remember this is really Cristi Balan’s baby. Thanking me for releasing a port of it is one thing but any kudos for the look and feel of the site should go to Cristi. Christi Balan is the star here, not me.

Demo Here

Download: Skittlish Theme (13853)

Built on WordPress. 95% Valid 43% of the time. Eat my feed. Snatch my vCard. Vote for Barack. I'd also like to thank the Academy, James’s Gate Brewery, the makers of Red Star Acid, and my undead laywer Fred Marpukiss

photo Amos Moses Griffin
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