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!

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Firefox 3.6 is out and unfortunately it has unveiled a slew of small annoyances in the Ahimsa theme caused either by the browser or more likely by wrong assumptions in styling in the theme. I am running through the issues right now and expect to have a fixed release of the theme out in under two weeks.

This version will also have support for a right sidebar, and a few other interesting new features. If you have things you have wanted in the theme, now’s the time to ask!

Sarvodaya is a new skin for the WordPress Theme Ahimsa and is available bundled in the 3.0 version of the theme. Below are some screenshots of this skin.

Sarvodaya Screenshots

Update: You can now download this version of the theme from the official WordPress site as well.

Download Ahimsa 3.0 for WordPress

With apologies for all the delays, and for the incomplete features and issues that remain, I am releasing Version 3.0 of Ahimsa for WordPress.

There is a lot in this new release (hence the bump up to version 3, rather than the 2.3 that was initially planned). Here’s a summary:

First the fine print

This release includes cleanup of the stylesheet. If you have custom CSS changes or equivalent, please beware (also see my offer towards the end of this post). Your custom skins will need to be updated to the new styles. You can do that by checking the “Update Skins” checkbox in the Ahimsa Options page of the admin section of your blog, and then clicking on Save Changes. The AhrenCode supplied skins (Kind of Blue, A Grey Mood) are already updated to the new style, so this step is not required in their case. The corollary is that if you have made custom modifications to these themes, then please save them before you install this version. Finally, as of this release, there is not even a pretense of IE6 support. Sorry, its just too much work.

New Features and Fixes

• Custom skin editing: if you created a skin in the past and were frustrated by the inability to edit it, this might be a bit of relief. You can now edit the skins you create (or have created) — the limit is that the skin has to be the current selected one. As the above fine print notes, the style sheets have now changed, so follow instructions above to first update any skins.

• New Skin “Sarvodaya”: this update includes a new earth toned and simplistic skin called Sarvodaya. Give me your thoughts on it!

• IE Rounded Corners: don’t get excited. This has turned out to be a horrible affair. After evaluating 10 or so JavaScript plugins and libraries, I settled on two that provide some support for rounded corners in Internet Explorer. A lot of disclaimers apply: no rounded corners for the titles, sidebar widgets, the action bubbles, etc; and an artifact: a small white section is displayed under the bottom bar of each post. If all of this is palatable to you, then visit the Ahimsa Options page and turn on IE rounded corners support. If you notice anything worse than the above, turn it off and let me know.

• Custom modifications support: for your own CSS customisations, or JavaScript snippets and such that you may need to add to the footer, there are now two files that you can use: <code>custom.css</code> (for your style overrides) and <code>footer-custom.php</code> (for your footer snippets). The stylesheet <code>custom.css</code> is loaded last by the theme, so you can override any of the styles in this file. And since these files are external to the theme files, your modifications are safe from theme upgrades (watch out, however, that your theme update does not nuke your entire theme directory, killing your custom files!).

• Proper Comment Reply Form AJAX behaviour: WP 2.7 introduced the feature of moving the reply box up immediately after a comment when you click to reply. That behaviour was broken in Ahimsa and has now been fixed.

• Share your skins: this is not a change to Ahimsa itself, but if you have created a custom skin that you want to share you can now do so. See the instructions on the Ahimsa page.

• W3C XTHML 1.0 Standard validation: many, many fixed to satisfy the W3C validator. One or three issues might persist but most are now gone. Check it out and let me know!

• Multi-page suppport: Ahimsa did not include support for mutli-page posts. It now does.

• Other fixes:
  • Fixed input fields in response form: The response form had ridiculously long input fields for Name, URL etc. That has now been fixed.
  • Increased line spacing: makes for easier reading for your audience.
  • New screenshot: the current one dates back to an Ahimsa 1.x release!
  • More information in the Options section
  • Fixed a bug where the date bubble in comments was getting chopped off on the right.
  • And a lot of other minor issues.

Many of you have waited patiently for this update and I hope this is worth the wait. As always, I greatly appreciate your feedback.

And if you have done customisations of the theme with which you need help, or if your skin does not update properly, etc, please do contact me and I will be glad to help.

Below is the download link for version 0.8 of the Ahimsa theme for Tumblr. Note that it was rejected by the powers at Tumblr for not meeting their aesthetic standards (ouch!), so use at your own risk. Don’t know what Tumblr is? It’s a “tumblelog” service, a sort of mini-blog, for posting quick notes, pictures, etc. Another player in this space is Posterous, a fast expanding service that provides unique email based posting and commenting and a range of other great features.

Ahimsa for Tumblr Version 0.8

If you are curious about how it looks, check out Ahren Code on Tumblr.

The Ahimsa WordPress theme has a bug that renders the “Site” and “Comments” feed links at the top right unusable (by adding a “feed:” at the front of the URL). This will be fixed in the next release, but in the meantime, you can make the following change to overcome the problem.

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One question that crops up in the comments or via email is how you might add an image (such as a logo) to the red header bar of the Ahimsa theme. This is a tricky issue, because how you accomplish this depends on what the function of the image is and how large it is. Perhaps you want the image to be a background image for the header, like is the case for many WordPress themes. Or perhaps the image is a small logo. The changes to be made to the header code vary correspondingly.

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A frequent question I am asked is how to add widgets (the boxes for “Tags”, “Categories”, “Calendar” and so on) in the sidebar. This is not an issue specific to the Ahimsa theme, but is a WordPress feature that is fully supported by Ahimsa. Below is a Blair Witch Project like ;-) video that shows you how you can add widgets to your sidebar through the WordPress admin section of your blog. I hope the video file format is viewable on your system. You may need to install QuickTime (free).

Below is the download link for version 2.2 of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress.

Ahimsa for Wordpress Version 2.2

What’s new:

• Fixes for IE6/7/8. No rounded corners on IE yet (and perhaps never), but lots of font changes, cleanup, IE specific style adjustments to make the theme render tolerably decent on IE.
• Fixed various bugs in the theme including bad comments and reply box rendering (thanks to various Ahimsa for WP users for pointing this out).
• Fixed JavaScript error(s) which were causing problems with IE in particular.
• Fixed bug where sidebar did not extend the entire length of the page when collapsed and restored.
• Fixed issue: pingbacks and trackbacks were not being displayed.
• Very preliminary/alpha implementation of custom skins. Currently, using a very simple interface, you can add your own colour schemes to Ahimsa for WP. An upcoming blog post will provide details. A few words of caution: there is no way to edit a “skin” using the UI and this implementation might change in a future release.

Stay tuned to the blog for additional info on skins.

Below is the download link for version 2.1 of the Ahimsa theme for WordPress.

Ahimsa for Wordpress Version 2.1

What’s new:

• Support for WordPress 2.7’s new comment mechanism (including threading, paging, per comment replies).
• Some changes to comments section, including:
  • Consistent use of title and action capsules.
  • Moved reply form to its own box.
• New configuration options for/to:
  • Default display of sidebar in posts and pages.
  • Turn off the § prefix symbol for sidebar sections.
  • Turn off display of date/author for pages.