Ikiru Design

I have mixed feelings about posting whenever a single theme is updated, but this is a pretty big one. And it’s also worth noting that the WordPress Themes Directory got it up less than 24 hours after I uploaded it. Given the large lead time that was needed for 0.7.6, I was pleasantly surprised to see that. So anyway, the most important changes are, in a particular order:

1. The theme now has an options page. Controllable are the accent color — at Ikiru Design that’s set to “orange” — which is used one the description in the header and the links in the footer, the display of default gravatars, the display of The Mini Quilt (see #2), and switching to Southern Hemisphere colors.
2. The Mini Quilt. The Mini Quilt is a smaller version of the Quilt that appears on Kaleidoscope archives pages. To fit, it sacrifices displaying the Post Titles — though you’ll see them on hover — in favor of offering many more posts than a basic Recent Posts widget would. (And if you want to display both, or have even more control of your sidebar, the quilt will also appear as a potential sidebar widget.)
3. The random post link in the footer is now compatible with WP Super Cache. Because the popular plugin changes a blog’s redirect rules, the old method — which required a redirect — would break when you ran the plugin. The new method, which gets rid of the need for a redirect, will help keep your server load down, and will let readers use the link whether you’re caching or note. (Also, I’m working on a post explaining two different workarounds for the problem.)
4. Fixed a number of visual “bugs”. Two different problems caused the layout of certain pages to break in 0.7.6, with the help of Babs, those are fixed. A number of little problems have been tackled.
5. Finally, and this may have been unnoticed by everyone but me, in previous version of Kaleidoscope (and every theme I’ve made for that matter) the search bar has been outside of the area in the sidebar that is replaced by widget. That is because I didn’t like the styling of the widget. But now I’ve overridden the styling of the widget, and am satisfied with it. Essentially, you finally have the freedom to put the search box where ever you want it in the sidebar.

These are some of things I’d been planning to do on Kaleidoscope and I’m glad to have finally gotten them out. I’m sure there are still problems lurking under the surface, and I’m sure a quick-eyed user will find them quicker than I. If you’re such a user, please drop me a line.

Oh, the download link! And here’s a link to Kaleidoscope’s listing in the WordPress Themes Directory.