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The drew3ooo Modicus Remix theme for Wordpress

Posted on Wednesday, 5 November, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Get under the hood and see how this blog works.

In honor of the Obama election and Guy Fawkes Day, I’m releasing the theme and associated plugins that make my website function. Download it here.

Download d3.zip from my drop.io drop box.

The design for this blog is an alteration of an alteration. The Modicus Remix theme for Wordpress is proving to be quite popular for an unsupported piece of open source brik-a-brak. Modicus Remix by Art Culture is a redesign of the theme Modicus by Upstart Blogger. I use a stripped down version of Modicus-Remix here, sexed up with a number of plugins, and slightly recoded to work better with Wordpress 2.5 – 2.6.

I’m now averaging about one question a week regarding the sidebar, which it seems a lot of people aren’t getting to work in their copies of Modicus-Remix. Mine didn’t work out of the box and I literally just hacked it until it did. No, I didn’t document this process and don’t quite remember everything I changed. So goes the fun process of home blog creation. The theme in its present incarnation requires a couple of plugins for it to work. Disable those plugins and your sidebar goes wonky.

In response to peoples queries, I’ve decided to release a generic version of The Drew3ooo Modicus Remix theme, as well as the bundle of plugins I use to make this particular site work. Note: These are the plugins installed now and may not all be the latest versions available. You don’t need to use all these, but some have been hard-coded into some templates so if you disable them you may have to go in and do some coding. Like Modicus-Remix, consider this one unsupported as well. Mostly it’s so people can install a working version to then tweak. The use license for this theme is simple: “Make any changes you want, do whatever you want, leave credit, don’t, it doesn’t matter.”

I like the theme. There’s a decent mix of wdigets and coding involved to create, for me anyway, a good amount of flexibility and it’s a design that I can continue to extend and change over time. The css is straightfoward enough to alow a lot of extending. But there are a few quirks to it to be worked out.

Subscribe To Comments and Get Recent Comments are coded into the sidebar. The archives page requires a plugin to work as well: SRG Clean Archives. It’s a different one than the original Modicus or Modicus-Remix used because that one was getting a little buggy with later versions of Wordpress.

Some of these plugin references are also built into the comment area at the end of posts, so you’ll have to edit there as well if you don’t use these.

Note the image at left: This is the section that’s hard-coded into the sidebar. Subscribe and trackback use plugins. Don’t have these and it breaks the sidebar.

The version I got also suggested using the_excerpt Reloaded, Related Posts and Mini Slides plugins. I don’t actually use those as my needs are pretty basic and the Related Posts plugin started giving me some grief and really, weren’t all that related. For a while I was also using the Simple Tags plugin, but have reverted to Wordpress’ own tagging system. All these remain in the plugins, though, so are bundled here.

Notes on the options:

The options allow a few things, most of which I don’t use. I just edit the css. I found that once I started changing the css around, the options started causing more harm than good. Most likely, if you’re starting from my version of the theme, the same will be true.

The options area provides you with the ability to change the body width, post width, sidebar width, post/sidebar position, background color, font color and main font style. In my version, I’ve just recorded what is in the css and use it as a resource for sizing things like graphics and videos.

Plugins bundle:

• Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• All in One SEO Pack: Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
• bdp-comments: List recent comments and posts
• BDP List Widget: General purpose sidebar widget for a list of user-defined text and links
• cforms: Offers quick and easycontact forms for your blog.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: I like sitemaps. Subbed out for Google sitemaps, but it’s still there active anyway. (See below)
• del.icio.us widget: Get it from Automattic, Inc.. Great for a sideblog on your site if you do a lot of web reading. I update this far more than the site itself.
• Fuzzy Recent Updates: I used this for a while but took it out of the sidebar as i’m always fixing typos and the updates tended to just be the latest posts anyway.
• Get Recent Comments: Can make you look more popular than you are if you don’t show the comment dates.
• Google Analytics: Coding your Google Analytics code into your site isn’t all that difficult, but this makes it even easier, especially if you’re creating more and more custom template pages.
• Google XML Sitemaps: i know, there’s that other sitemap. But I really like a sitemap, so why shouldn’t I like two twice as much?
• Gravatar: use them if you like. It’s one of the plugins that the Modicus creators suggested as necessary. This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. I don’t pay it much notice, but for people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing those people will like.
• JPF Quotes: One of my favorites. Easy to use and deploy with the Samsarin PHP Widget.
• ShareThis: I added it. don’t know that it gets used much, but is well worth it.
• Simple Tags: I started using this in earlier Wordpress versions. Don’t know that it’s all that necessary post 2.5.
• Single Bookmark Category List: List bookmarks from one bookmark category for WordPress 2.3+. Licensed under GPL v2. By Azmeen (HTNet). I’ve created a bookmarks page that lists these instead of keeping them in the sidebar. They were getting too many as I’m a bookmark feind.
• SRG Clean Archives: Very clean for your archives page.
• Subscribe To Comments: You need this for your sidebar to work. Alternately, you can go in and wipe the code out of your sidebar, but it’s kind of spiffy.
• the_excerpt Reloaded: Necessary? You decide.
• Upgrade Preflight Check: use this before upgrading wordpress themes. Will save you some misery.
• WordPress.com Stats: Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. Very nifty.
• WP-Footnotes: Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. I love footnotes, but to be honest, the novelty has worn thin.

Hard-coded navigation:

• In the header: almost everything you see there is hard-wired. Outside of meta data, the header is not pulling you blog’s name, description or page navigation. Edit header.php to include these elements. It’s sort of a DIY form of SEO. I use slightly differnet titles in the meta data that Google likes than in the actual php file which is what people see when they visit the page. This ups the amount of content and also gives the browser heading a different message than the page itself, which can be fun.
• In the sidebar: The liner notes are all hard coded. The top area offering track backs, commenting links nad options and post editing when looking at an individual post is also hardcoded and needs the plugins mentioned above to operate correctly. if you don’t use those plugins, you’ll have to edit this part of sidebar.php. There are a number of default sidebar items which also need the plugins activated to work. You can wipe all of them out by using the widgets
• Footer: All hard-wired. Include whatever content you want here by editing footer.php.

Widgets

The sidebar is actually two sidebars. Modicus Remix included two widgetized sidebars, one for the index page and another for all other pages. To add widgets, click on the Widgets tab. Sidebar 1 in the Widgets tab appears on all pages. Sidebar 2 appears above Sidebar 1 on the index page. In my version, I’ve enabled both sidebars to appear on all pages. Change it back if you don’t like it.

Note: Adding a widget to Sidebar 1 will hide everything in the default sidebar, except for the About blurb and the Upstart Blogger credit. You can edit or delete the blurb, which by default appears only on the index page, by opening sidebar.php in any text editor, or from the Theme Editor tab. Please keep the link to Upstart Blogger. Add drew3ooo as well as Modicus-Remix if you’re feeling extra giddy.

As the people who made the earlier version said, “If you do, good fortune will bless you from unexpected places. If you don’t, you will be unlucky in love.”

I’ve enabled both to show up in all views. If you don’t activate any of these ,you’ll have the default sidebar. Sidebar 2 appears on top of sidebar 1. Strange, but true.

What this theme doesn’t do well

• It handles lists kind of funny.
• The new wordpress image caption tool renders not too well as there’s not much imaging css. It’s on my to-do list somewhere after raising my son.
• The first paragraph on an individual post view is bigger than it is in the index view. This formatting is lost if you include an image or anything remotely fancy in the first graph.
• Some people think the text is a bit small.
• Some video formats don’t work well here. Fancy video plugins tend to break the site. Best to not use the wysiwig if you’re embedding audio or video.

Still interested?

Download d3.zip from my drop.io drop box.

File this one under InterWeb, Technophillia | Tagged in design, InterWeb, Modicus-Remix, plugins, themes, WordPress | 5 are talking about this