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Open call to Black Hat theme users

April 21, 2009 by  

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Having all this time off lately has afforded me something that I hadn’t previously had — an opportunity to spend a great deal of time on my Black Hat theme. I’ve taken the last update further by incorporating more theme options. As of right now the following can be added or controlled via the Theme Options: Sidebar location (and/or removal), Feedburner URL (replace the default RSS feed link in sidebar), Feedburner email subscription link, meta keywords, latest Tweet in the sidebar, Related Posts.

What I’d like from you is: what functionalities would you like to see added to Black Hat? I am getting close to releasing this update and would love some feedback on what should be added next.

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Comments

37 Responses to “Open call to Black Hat theme users”

  1. Skizo on April 21st 2009 at 5:53 pm

    I like it. Think I might even use it for my clan/guild website, with a couple fixes. Will hit you back once I’m done XD

  2. Rick on April 25th 2009 at 4:24 pm

    Hello Nicki,

    I am new to WP and going to set it up to replace my existing site. I really like the Black Hat theme. To me, it has a very classic look.

    Question: Is the “Most Recently Blogged” with the strikethrough a plug-in or is it from WP or the theme?

    As far as additional features go, the one thing that struck me as a little not very user friendly is the white background in the text editor vs. the dark background in the displayed posts. Don’t know if that is within the scope of a theme or where the .css for that is, but it is something I would consider changing.

    The other thing that I wonder about, is why more themes aren’t floating width.

    Anyway, I love your work and will be implementing Black Hat very soon.

    Thanks!

    • Nicki on May 9th 2009 at 12:15 pm

      Rick,

      The “Most Recently Blogged” with the strikethrough is something I added specifically to my personal blog here, but I am adding this style feature to Black Hat in its next release.

      Thanks!

  3. Aranjedeath on May 8th 2009 at 8:56 pm

    I actually found a bug in the theme (whatever one is up on wp-themes as of now), and wanted to confirm it with you as either fixed or acknowledged. I’ve not taken the time to muck around and try to fix it, but I may later on. On any of my blog posts, http://thermite.no-ip.info/blog/index.php/2009/04/27/so-i-had-an-idea/ for example, the related posts box isn’t rendering correctly. I doublechecked in chrome, ff, and ie8 to see if it was a browser issue and it isn’t. I’m not entirely sure why there isn’t anything in the related posts box, but I have a hunch the lack of text there has something to do with the problem.

    Aranjedeath´s last blog post: So I had an Idea…

    • Nicki on May 9th 2009 at 10:33 am

      Hi,

      As stated in the theme readme, this function looks at the first tag listed for a post and will find all posts matching that tag. Unfortunately, if that post is the first to use that tag, nothing will show.

      This is one of the things I am trying to fix will be fixed in the next release of Black Hat.

      Thanks!

  4. Ross on May 15th 2009 at 2:40 pm

    Hi Nicki
    I found your theme (v1.1) the other day and thought I would give it a spin on my site. I like it and have made a couple of tweaks to add some colour. I use the WPG2 plug-in to integrate my gallery2 site into WordPress. I have tried a number of different things to try get the page to display correctly. As far as I can tell the header and footer display correctly but the main content page disappears and is replaced by the gallery2 front page. Have you any suggestions as to how I can fix it?
    Thanks
    Ross
    P.S. is 1.1 the latest version? Under “Theme Options” I only have the option to change the sidebar from left to right.

    Ross´s last blog post: Christ in Colossae

    • Nicki on May 15th 2009 at 3:03 pm

      Hi Ross,

      I’m not intimately familiar with that plugin. Did you change any files when you added the gallery? If so, which one(s)?

      Re: version number – Yes, that is the current version. (the latest version available will always be hosted on WordPress.org)

      I plan on releasing an update pretty soon.

      Thanks for stopping bye! :)

      Nicki

      • ross on May 19th 2009 at 4:33 pm

        I had a read of the WPG2 docs and created a custom header.php and footer.php and then a wpg2.css file. Just copying in the elements I needed I got the gallery page embedded correctly with the header and footer displaying in the right place.
        I just need to get the gallery to display correctly in the sidebar – for some reason the thumbnail links are all arranged vertically instead of horizontally.

  5. CJ on May 16th 2009 at 1:36 pm

    I just wanted to post this really quickly, but I wanted to note that I’ve been having a problem with comments with this theme. I haven’t tried changing the skin to see if the problem persists with others, but I also have several other wordpress installations running on this server and none of the others have had any problems.

    Basically, when someone posts a comment, it says the comment is posted successfully then redirects to a different entry. The comment shows up on the appropriate entry page, but it is still attributed the incorrect entry on both the index page, as well as in the dashboard.

    Kind of awkward to explain, so I apologize if that doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps if you have the chance you can test it out?. I have considered that it might have something to do with my permalink structure, but I’m not totally sure.

    Hope to hear back!

    CJ´s last blog post: Doom Roulette Episode 2: Viscous 2

    • Nicki on May 18th 2009 at 8:16 am

      Hi CJ,

      I’ve heard of that happening before, but do not know what causes it. I ran into something similar on one of my test environments a while back when the database had gotten corrupted. Does it still happen when you change themes?

      Thanks for dropping by! :)

      Nicki

      • CJ on May 18th 2009 at 12:55 pm

        I just tested it out, and yes–the comments work fine in the wordpress classic theme. i didn’t try in the new wordpress theme but I am going to go ahead and assume it will work with that as well.

        I have made a few modifications, though. So I will run everything I changed through the w3 validator and see if I messed something up.

        …

        Well, it appears that a couple of the entries had some nasty html bugs in it, and after spraying some RAID all over the place I think I may have fixed the problem. I guess I’m going to have to start inspecting my pals’ entries for bad html from now on :)

        Either way, the problem persists after fixing all the problems I could find. I’m not sure what could be causing it!

        I noticed, also while validating, that you did not include the “rows” and “cols” attributes to the comment box. I doubt that would cause any problems, but it is something that the validator complains about anyhow so it would be good form to fix it in a future release. :)

        • Nicki on May 18th 2009 at 9:31 pm

          Ok, thanks for getting back with me on this. I’ll do some researching and see if I can find out if other designers have run into this.

          re: comment box — weird, I wouldn’t have thought it would bark about that. I’ll add that to the “to do” list! :)

          Thanks!

        • Nicki on May 20th 2009 at 8:50 am

          Hi CJ,

          I’ve been doing some reading up on this issue and one suggestion that I keep seeing is to run a REPAIR on your WordPress database.

          Could you try that and let me know if it fixes your problem?

          Thanks!

    • Rick on May 18th 2009 at 8:57 pm

      Heya Nicki,

      I’m still enjoying your theme.

      I have also experienced problems with comments displaying. Changing to a default theme clears up the problem.

      I have tried to figure out a repeatable way of demonstrating the issue, and can’t as yet.

      Have also noticed some problems in the way the Related Posts renders (with more than one browser). Mine seems OK right now, but this page does not http://words.mixedbredie.net/archives/299.

      Thanks again for all of your efforts.

      Rick´s last blog post: Ball Season has Officially Started

      • Nicki on May 18th 2009 at 9:33 pm

        Hi Rick,

        Thanks for letting me know about the comments bug, I’ll look into it.

        The Related Posts feature will be fixed in the next update.

        Thanks again for stopping by! :)

        • ross on May 19th 2009 at 4:30 pm

          @Nicki and Rick,
          I managed to fix the related post styling error by changing the float to none:
          .related-title {
          margin-bottom: 10px;
          color: #c4c3c3;
          width: 450px;
          font-weight: bold;
          font-size: 130%;
          float:none;
          }
          I don’t know much CSS but that seemed to do the trick.

        • Chvad on May 19th 2009 at 11:14 pm

          just another mention of the comment bug. Happens to me as well. Ceases to happen when another them is used. THANKS! Love the them overall! Great work!

          Chvad´s last blog post: Morley Volume Plus (Model PVO+)

          • Nicki on May 20th 2009 at 8:51 am

            Hi Chvad,

            I’ve been doing some reading up on this issue and one suggestion that I keep seeing is to run a REPAIR on your WordPress database.

            Could you try that and let me know if it fixes your problem?

            Thanks!

          • Chvad on May 20th 2009 at 11:10 am

            Thanks for the quick response!

            just tried the repair database idea… no luck. Also, like others, this doesn’t happen with other themes in use.

            Chvad´s last blog post: Nord Lead 2X

      • Nicki on May 18th 2009 at 9:37 pm

        Oh, and by the way, your doggies are adorable! :)

      • Nicki on May 20th 2009 at 8:50 am

        Hi Rick,

        I’ve been doing some reading up on this issue and one suggestion that I keep seeing is to run a REPAIR on your WordPress database.

        Could you try that and let me know if it fixes your problem?

        Thanks!

        • Rick on May 20th 2009 at 9:12 pm

          Did a check DB and it showed no problems.

          Also did a repair. No difference (which is what I expected because comments work fine with other themes).

          I also browsed through the tables, and the relations between the comments and the posts look as expected.

          If I have some next time, I will cruise through the code and see if I can see something. I’ve done a lot with phpBB, but have not done much with WP (yet).

          Just to expand on what is happening, the indicator on the post indicates the right number of comments. Its just that they do not show up.

          Cheers,

          Rick

          Rick´s last blog post: Ball Season has Officially Started

  6. 7sins on May 17th 2009 at 8:29 am

    Hi Nicki,
    I am presently using your Black Hat Theme on my site.
    I must say that you have made a very lovely theme.

    But there were a few things which I incorporated myself to make the theme more user-friendly.

    1. When a visitor views a post there is no navigational link to help the visitor move forward or backward. This I have implemented in the form of the previous and next post title which are available at the top of the post.

    2. The blockquotes background colour was so nearly identical to the background body colour that it was quite daunting to find out the difference. So I change the style of the blockquotes.

    3. Also if an image has a caption it gets repeated twice below the image which sort of breaks the flow. So I had to fix it again with a bit of CSS.

    These were some of the changes that I have done to your theme. If you feel there are better ways to tackle the same problems then do incorporate the same in your future updates and I would be more that willing to test them.

    7sins´s last blog post: XBMC and Music Album Art

    • Nicki on May 18th 2009 at 8:30 am

      Hi! Thanks for coming by and leaving a comment. If you’ll send me a copy of your modified stylesheet, I would love to see the changes you incorporated.

      (Email is nicki at nicki faulk dot com)

      Thanks! :)

  7. Katya on May 19th 2009 at 8:16 am

    Hi Nicki! I just send an email to you about the blackhat theme, before seeing this tread! So I’m posting the same question, maybe someone can help me? here’s the original email:

    “Hi Nicki! I’m having some problems with one of your themes, Black Hat ver 1.1. I really enjoy it and am using it as a base for my own theme (won’t forget to thank you in the comments :)) My only problem is that the only widget I need, the pages widget, is not showing in the sidebar. Since it works on both default and classic themes, I’m wondering if I’m missing some code? I checked out the forums but nothing really seems to work! Would be for ever grateful for some help! Thanks in advance! – Katya”

    • Nicki on May 19th 2009 at 8:27 am

      Hi Katya,

      I just replied to your email with the following:

      By default, it is disabled in the sidebar because it’s already being displayed in the horizontal menu.

      To get around this, open the theme’s functions.php file, then find and delete the following lines:

      function widget_mytheme_pages() {
      /* Pages are in the header. No need to have them in the sidebar too. */
      }

      And:

      register_sidebar_widget(__('Pages'), 'widget_mytheme_pages');

  8. Nicki on May 20th 2009 at 6:19 pm

    CJ and Chvad,

    FYI: I’m emailing you two with another question/suggestion regarding comment bug. (because these comment threads are getting hard to follow, LOL!)

    Thanks!



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