Agenda
Introduction
Binary Blue is a fully WP 2.5 compliant, heavily AJAX enhanced WordPress theme. Its ZIP package contains more than a dozen different schemes, among them the fabulous True Blue style, which is an improved port of the style with the same name originally created by Steve Lam and included with his explicit permission.
Binary Blue contains a fully degradable AJAX enhanced Paged Comments function, which is sort of world exclusive at the current point of time, as there’s no other WordPress plugin or theme yet, which would support such a feature.
Each of the AJAX enhanced features degrade automatically and gracefully if a visitor with a non-javascript browser visits the blog; the functionality then defaults automatically to the default behaviour of any common theme.
Binary Blue is not only a “simple” theme but a complete theme suite resp. sort of a theme platform, which enables you as the user to configure lots of options, so you can customize the complete theme without the need to change a single line of HTML or even PHP code.
Latest Release
- Version 1.4.2 as of 28th of October 2007
This release is a pure bugfix release which fixes the incompiances which have been introduced by the idiots of the WP TEAM (they just did not think about all the themes and plugins which made use of parts of the DB structure) when they introduced WordPress 2.3. Concerning Binary Blue, this affects the archives page and the asides configuration only. So if you don’t use either feature, you may stills tick to the 1.4.1 release, but for everybody else the bugfix release is strongly recommanded. I won’t answer any help requests any longer which concern these issues.
Tip jar
If you like Binary Blue and the work I’ve invested into it, including all the support you receive in the forum and via email, and if you want to do me a favor in return, please have a look at my Amazon wishlist.
Alternatively, feel free to donate any amount you find suitable through Paypal
Features
- Full Sidebar Widgets support, including tons of theme-special widgets, including livesearch, authorinfo box and stuff. I strongly suggest to download and use this, as it is a quantum leap in blog customization!
- Fully Microshaft Internet Exploder 7 compliant schemes
- fully localized
- integrates LightboxJS 2.0.2 as an integrated theme plugin
- fully compliant to Wordpress releases 2.0.x up to 2.5.x
- Fully skinnable with your own schemes
- integrates full comment quicktags functionality
- originally it was partly based on the popular K2 theme by Michael Heilemann and Chris J. Davis
- Degradable AJAX Livesearch
- Degradable AJAX LiveComments
- AJAX enhanced Paged Comments
- Degradable AJAX Inline Content expansion/shrinkage
- Degradable AJAX Inline Comments
- Degradable AJAX Calendar
- LiveArchive available, when Extended Live Archive plugin found and activated
- Integrated support for Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin
- Integrated support for my own WP-Short-Keyword plugin
- Integrated support for Brian’s Latest Comments plugin by Brian Meidell
- Integrated support for Get Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies
- Integrated support for WP-Sociable
- Integrated support for Gravatars
- Integrated support for Optimal Title plugin
- Integrated support for Ryan Prins’s Amazon Wishlist plugin
- Integrated support for xfish_meta plugin
- Integrated support for Landing Sites plugin
- Integrated modified version of Dustin Diaz’ Sweet Titles
- Integrated UDASSS-based scheme switcher support
- Works perfectly together with Spam Karma 2.x
- Intuitive configuration dialog in administrative interface (after activating the theme you’ll see a new subcategory named “Binary Blue options” in the presentation section of your admin panel)
- Dozens of different schemes are available
- Configurable Asides/shorties functionality
- integrates the search hilite plugin by Ryan Boren
- Includes (usually hidden) additional HTML output to comply with WAI and Section 508 requirements (in Germany this is known as “barrierefreies Internet”)
- ZIP File contains a copy of the license.txt (sort of a MIT license - you can do pretty anything with my code that you want, as long as you publish the credits it deserves)
Download
Community Forum
Important installation / update information
Available Localizations
Complete Version History
Available Schemes
Your feedback, bug reports, feature requests and so on are welcome and well appreciated!
David A meint
CountZero,
I just tried to download version 9.0, and got an “Unexpected end of archive” error message.
CountZero meint
Hello ZEO, thank you very much for your feedback and your thoughts.
oh, that’s a drawback I was not knowing about. So, the conclusion on this is either remove the direct support for /IE7/, or otherwise add an option on the theme’s option page, to let the blogowner decide for himself whether (s)he wants inherent /IE7/ support. What do you think about this?
This is one of the most important conditions, that’s right. Current 0.8.5 release of the theme draws full attention to this, there shouldn’t be any onLoad event assigned in the body anymore in any place.
that’s a nice idea, I will do so this evening, when I am home again.
As far as I have seen in the past months, it seems to be common to distribute themes and plugins under the MIT license; so I think I will use it as well, especially as I am making use of some code that’s published under it. I’ll add a readme file which notes the license into this evening’s release
ZEO meint
David A, there’s should be no whitespace or extra line at the end of the edited file.
CountZero, indeed you made an excellent job with this theme. But here’s my thought.
Applying Dean Edwards IE7 patch is good, but there’s a drawback. For example, the transparent PNG; if the page has a lot of transparent PNG there’s a possibility your browser crash or freeze.
As I made it clear in my previous blog entry, window.onload event are not be present inside the
BODYto made it work with lightbox.You have to check the theme on the following condiition:
logged in user
user with no cookie save
user with cookie save
livesearch enable or disable
livecommenting enable or disable
livesearch and live comment enable or disable
All supported plugin installed
If u said that u fix most of K2 bug and glitches in this theme, why don’t u submit it to k2bugs.therobotreport.com. I think the whole K2 community would love that.
BTW, what is this theme distribution license?
Cheers.
David A meint
Hi CountZero,
I am having some issues with the theme, and the localization you were talking about. If I edit the “wp_lang to “en_US” in the wp-config file, I start getting errors like the following:
(this is where the file upload block is on the post.php page)
Additionally, if I try to change the theme, I get the following information:
Even when I take the “en_US” in the wp-config out, it still gives me the error. I then have to delete the entire WordPress installation and reinstall it. (I am doing this on a brand new site, so I am not losing anything important)
Any ideas?
I am perfectly comfortable manually translating the theme if I have to.
CountZero meint
Hi David,
translation shouldn’t be an issue any more - just download the latest version of the theme; the en_US.mo file is part of the ZIP, so if you have set wp_lang to “en_US” in your configuration file (wp-config.php), most stuff will be translated into english. There are only a few really huge parts like in the 404.php or the archive pages, where still some German resides, but this is free text every blogger will enter on his own in any case
I will take a look on the quicktag button stuff later on, perhaps I can implement some support for this. Another next step is implementing the Lightbox JS plugin support for ZEOs new plugin, and I am interested in the AJAX based solution for paged comments. so stay tuned, there are things to come
David A meint
BTW: Have you considered some kind of quicktags for formatting comments? I tried the quicktag plugin, but it just made large buttons.
David A meint
Hi CountZero,
I am still running the 0.7 version of the theme on that site, but I intend to upgrade it in the next couple of days.
I am considering this theme for a couple of other sites I work on. You have certainly come up with a winner on this one. The big challenge for me is the translation thing
CountZero meint
hi david, thank you very much for your feedback; it is very much appreciated.
technorati told me by incident yesterday evening, that there is one reference via the theme name to my site, so i checked back and ran across your site. when i wanted to submit a comment there, I got the same javascript error (in firefox, this meant the comment would not be submittd, though). as you can see here, I cannot reproduce the error, so I suppose it is some missing javascript file.
I have published a 0.7.1 version yesterday evening that contains some smart fixes for the livecommenting feature and some other tiny things here and there.
I am greatly surprised how many international users are interested in binary blue, so my first reaction was to translate this article into english for a wider audience. One of the next steps must be some sort of translation support. Either I’ll dig into the wordpress language file mechanisms, or I have to support some sort of localization ini files. As the .mo file solution seems far more convenient I will give that way a try first.
David A meint
CountZero,
This is by far, the best WordPress theme I have run across. At first I got a little confused over the “tubes of mustard”, but I think I figured that out.
A couple of things: I notice that this page creates an error in Internet Explorer 6 where it is expecting an object of some sort on line 920. (I checked the view source, and there is no line 920, which has me puzzled.)
Also, do you plan on releasing an English version of this theme? I have tried to translate the best I could using Google Translator, but it doesn’t always work out right.
I see you are continually working on the theme right now, so I will keep checking back…
Great work!
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