If you are an Indianapolis Colts fan, take heart. All is not wrong with the world, for now there is a new version of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress. Alright, okay, a new version of some WordPress theme does not equal a SuperBowl ring, but remember, you don’t get to wear a SuperBowl ring but you do get to decorate your blog as you desire!

If you have performed any customisation of Ahimsa (by creating or editing skins, or creating a custom stylesheet custom.css or custom footer footer-custom.css) then please, PLEASE read the section below on Saving your Ahimsa Customisations before you click on the Download button.

Saving your Ahimsa Customisations

This version has some new features and a few very important fixes. One problem with theme upgrades in general is that when they are performed using the WordPress Dasbhoard, WordPress removes the current theme, thus destroying any customisations you might have made (in its defence, WordPress pops up a message warning you of this upcoming disaster). This is a particularly problematic issue for the Ahimsa theme since I support various user customisations in the theme and save that information to the theme directory, and such customisations can be part of what is lost as a part of the upgrade process.

To avoid this problem for future releases, I have moved the Ahimsa customisation files to a different location. This will save you for future upgrades. But what about this one? For that I have written a little plugin that you should install and run before you upgrade the theme. It all sounds very complicated, I admit, but it’s not! See the steps below:

1. Backup your theme

It may be a good idea to backup your theme files, just to be safe

2. Download and install the Ahimsa Fix plugin

Download the plugin zip file and install it via:
Dashboard → Plugins → Add New → Upload

3. Run the Plugin

Run the plugin via:
Dashboard → Settings → Ahimsa Custom Fixer
(yeah, I could have come up with a better name ;-)). Let it do its thing, until you see a greenish box saying All Done. The plugin assumes that your web server has write access to various parts of your WordPress installation. If that is not true, it will print out an error message. You can now safely Deactivate and Delete the Plugin, and go ahead with the upgrade of the Ahimsa theme.

4. Update your Skins

If you created any skins, please update them via:
Dashboard → Appearance → Ahimsa Options
Select “Update Skins” and click on “Save Changes”.

• Tested: Safari4, Chrome Beta for Mac, Firefox 3.6, IE7, PHP 4.3 and above, WP 2.8 and above
• Left, Right and No sidebars
• Quick Fancybox Gallery shortcode
• FAQinway: FAQ shortcode
• Use of “theme store” outside theme directory to avoid losing customisation files on theme upgrade
• Option to disable action/feed box for pages
• Fix for Firefox 3.6 title alignment issue
• Updated fade in/out effects to jQuery (fixes flicker issue)
• Various other fixes

If you are curious about how to use the shortcodes mentioned above, stay tuned for a post coming up shortly. You can see an example of the Quick Fancybox Gallery in the instruction images (clickable thumbnails) above.

Two fixes (the Firefox 3.6 title issue, and a fix for comments code for older WordPress versions) identified by Ahimsa users. I wish I could give them the attribution but I have forgotten who they are. My sincerest apologies to them. I am searching through the comments to find their names.

UPDATE with CREDITS: Caleb Adam Haye deserves credit for identifying and fixing the comments code for old WordPress versions. Mike identified a bug (and the fix for it) in the skin edit code. TheJuice, Nakke, Geakz and Chris Kaczor identified the Firefox 3.6 title rendering issue (Chris took the additional step of filing a bug at GitHub, and Geakz and BigLeague tested Ahimsa 3.1 before release); John Campbell figured out the cause of the problem (an IE specific CSS specification). My thanks are due to all of them, and those I have forgotten to mention (this latter group also deserves my apologies; please identify yourself in the comments), as well as all of you who have found this theme useful and encouraged me with your comments and feedback.