Germany might have spanked English bottoms today but you can come out on top with this spanking new release of Rachel for WordPress! This is version 0.93 and along with fixing various annoyances and anti-features (some like to call them “bugs”), it adds support for WordPress 3.0′s nifty background colour/image options. Want to know what’s fixed? Visit the GitHub Commit Log and read about the changes made after 2010-06-16.

This version of the theme is close to approval and should go live at WordPress.org shortly (I hope!). A shout-out is owed to Tom Lany for his patient and detailed review comments.

See previous post for screenshots.

Rachel is a theme for WordPress. Read more about it here.

Fotile is a simple web app for generating a tile puzzle from an image, which can then be solved by swapping pieces. Images can be loaded from a URL, from a local directory (under your Fotile installation root) or from Flickr’s “interesting” page. You can read more about Fotile here.

You can now download Version 3.2 of the Ahimsa for WordPress theme from the link below, or from the WordPress.org site shortly (once it is approved). If you are upgrading from a version of Ahimsa older than 3.1 and you have made customisations and created custom skins, you should first upgrade to Ahimsa 3.1.1 after reading about it.

• Tested: Safari4, Chrome 3 on Win, Chrome 5 for Mac, Firefox 3.6, IE7, IE8, Opera 10.53, PHP 4.3 and above, WP 2.8 and above
• No longer supported: IE6, Safari < 3.1
• Internationalisation support (potential translators: please see included POT file)
• Rotated text in sidebar tab
• Support for header logo
• Changes for rounded corners on Opera 10.53 and higher
• More robust parsing by QFGallery shortcode
• Theme now uses jQuery bundled into WordPress
• Removed jQuery conflicts with MooTools (and MooTools based plugins), etc
• Sidebar show/hide effect is now “slide” rather than “fade”
• Added hint on permitted tags when focus is on comment response form
• New screenshot! ;-)
• Various other fixes

I am yet to write up instructions on how to use the two shortcodes (QFGallery and FAQinway) built into Ahimsa. I will get to that as soon as I get this post out.

I have created a cheatsheet for Markdown. See this page for info and download links.

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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This is a small release that replaces images that may or may not be GPL/free with ones that definitely are (it also includes more background images). There are some minor fixes and also some code cleanup.

Download Audacity of Tanish for WordPress 1.0.1

This should be up at WordPress as well shortly.

Download Audacity of Tanish 0.7 for Posterous

This is version 0.7 of Audacity of Tanish — a theme for Posterous. If you do not know what Posterous is, you should find out. This is the first release of the theme. The version number means that it is incomplete — which does not imply that its buggy (which all software is!) but that more essential styling and changes are on their way.

Download Audacity of Tanish 1.0

Audacity of Tanish for WordPress is a theme for WordPress — more info here. What’s new in this release:

• Tileable configurable background choices
• Option to display most recent post in expanded mode, in the index/home page
• Popout styling for selected post in index/home page
• Superimposed author gravatar in post page
• Collapsible comments block, now attached to the post
• Built-in support for FancyBox using a WP shortcode (qfgallery)
• Styling for TABLEs, headings and PREs
• Ping/trackback comments support
• Support for multi-page posts
• More IE related fixes
• More configuration options
• Better/clearer link to post page in index page
• Cleaned up the stylesheet
• and many, many fixes

Click here for some Screenshots and a video of AoT in action.

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.