Harder Better Faster Stronger
I have finally finished the Wordpress theme I’ve been threatening for so long. It’s what you’re looking at right now.
Download “Harder Better Faster Stronger”
News
07 Feb 08: This theme was originally written to take advantage of Ultimate Tag Warrior tags. UTW has been superseded by a native tagging feature introduced in WP 2.3. I’ve got support for native tagging working now, and need to insert those changes into this file.
Release notes
Harder Better Faster Stronger (or HBFS to its friends) is a grid-based theme designed to give prominence to content from external sources (such as del.icio.us, flickr, etc) on the front page.
This theme is inspired by Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction 7.0 and Derek Powazek’s DePo Clean, but is an original work, apart from random code snippets cribbed from the Wordpress website.
Installation
Locate the directory themes/harder-better-faster-stronger/ in this distribution, and upload it to the directory wp-content/themes/ on your Wordpress installation. Activate it from the Presentation tab in Wordpress.
Optionally, you can install my customized del.icio.us widget: this is in plugins/widgets/ in this distribution, and should be uploaded to wp-content/plugins/widgets/ on your Wordpress installation. Activate this from the Plugins tab in Wordpress and then drag the widget into one of the theme’s sidebars (the theme is customized for this widget to be in Sidebar #1).
Sidebars
The theme has two sidebars for installing widgets: the fat bottom and the actual on-the-side sidebar. The fat bottom is sidebar #1. I am distributing a slightly hacked-up version of the del.icio.us widget (see in plugins/widgets/), and the stylesheet includes a few custom styles to make the flickrss, last.fm, and del.icio.us widgets look nice.
Banners
The theme includes Dan Benjamin’s image rotator script. I am including a few banners, extracted from photos I have taken myself. You are welcome to use them, but I encourage everyone to customize this theme by using their own images. Images should be cropped and scaled to 800 x 200 pixels.
Customizing
The file “header.php” contains a list that is rendered as a navigation bar. You can enter hard-coded links to a few specific entries here. Out of the box, it includes a link to your blog’s root URL, the blog administrator’s e-mail, and the search box. The search box is specially formatted and should be left alone, but you are free to alter the rest of the list. The list should contain no more than six items, including the search box.
If you want to show more entries in full on the front page, open the file “home.php” and edit the line
$posts = get_posts("numberposts=1");
You will also want to edit the line
$posts = get_posts("numberposts=5&offset=1");
Plugins
HBFS is set up out to work with Ultimate Tag Warrior straight of the box, but does not require it. It is widget-ready: if you are using the latest version of Wordpress, widgets are already active. If you are running an older version, you may need to install the Widgets plugin.
A nice, straightforward theme - though it might benefit from a bit of colour.
Why does it list my posts backwards?
Fascinating. I’m at a loss, I confess. The code that’s showing your posts backwards is exactly the same as what I’m running, which shows them going forwards.