WordPress theme: Tranquility

Tranquility screenshot

After about two nights of coding, I just released my second publicly available WordPress theme. It’s even got a small (80*80, less than 1 kb) Flash anim. The animation is embedded using Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject, making it fully valid xhtml whilst avoiding Internet Explorer’s ActiveX activation issue and dealing gracefully with older plugin versions, etc.

You can download it here.

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Roy | October 27, 2006 | English,WordPress themes | Comments (33)

33 Comments

  1. Very nice! Very stylish. I like the colour combo….

    Reply Comment by suzero — October 29, 2006 @ 10:22 am

  2. so nice! you’re great!!!!!!!!!!

    Reply Comment by Zen — October 31, 2006 @ 7:27 am

  3. Hey — I’m using Tranquility, and I love it. But I did encounter one small problem: when I post photos that are landscape-oriented — horizontal rather than vertical — the picture itself doesn’t appear until after the sidebar. If the post is older and thus is below the sidebar, then the picture displays without issue. But if it’s at the top of the page, the picture doesn’t display until after the sidebar. Were you aware of this, and is there a fix for it?

    Thank you. And thanks for a great theme.

    Reply Comment by Burrill — November 8, 2006 @ 5:23 am

  4. Hi Burrill. That happens when an image is too wide to fit alongside the sidebar. If you resize your images to be no wider than 540 pixels it should work.

    Reply Comment by Roy — November 8, 2006 @ 5:29 am

  5. Thanks, Roy. I actually found a solution by widening the blog body just enough to accomodate the picture.

    And thank you for the quick response.

    Reply Comment by Burrill — November 8, 2006 @ 8:38 am

  6. Hi Roy, ik zag jouw theme op Ryan Carsons http://www.barenakedapp.com

    GOOD WORK!

    groeten,
    Tanja

    Reply Comment by Tanja — November 10, 2006 @ 5:29 am

  7. This was my favourite theme out of the entire WordPress catalogue! Thanks so much! I’m customizing it little by little. Click my name below to see what I’ve done.

    I’m not crazy about there being Flash on my page though. Any tips on how to convert it to animated gif?

    Reply Comment by Brian Damage — November 16, 2006 @ 4:49 pm

  8. Your site looks great! ;)

    I’m pretty sure this particular animation won’t work as an animated gif. For one thing it doesn’t loop. All the animation is math based and randomized. And it relies on very subtle shading which is hard to get in a 256 color gif. Let alone in under 1kb.

    I wrote instructions on http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/1146/tranquility-10/ on how to replace the flash with a gif. See the comments section.

    Please note that if people do not have flash (version 6 or better), a preplacement gif is shown (the current one is non-animated though. I’ve used Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject, which is such a brilliant way of embedding Flash that even Adobe itself uses it.

    Reply Comment by Roy — November 16, 2006 @ 11:16 pm

  9. Very nice, I’m using it locally myself. It’s nice, clean, small, yet has that extra flare from the non-static spinning SWF, rather than an over-repetitive non-smooth GIF.

    Reply Comment by David Edwards — November 18, 2006 @ 9:23 am

  10. I had hoped to add a left-hand column to put very faint 1′s and 0′s vertically along the side, but I’m too dumb to figure it out so I gave up on that. :) However, I’d like to sort categories alphabetically instead of by ID number. I presume I have to change something in sidebar.php. Do I have to insert something between the parentheses here?

    Thanks!

    Reply Comment by Brian Damage — November 21, 2006 @ 8:56 am

  11. @brain damage: Please check http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_cats for all the options.

    Reply Comment by Roy — November 21, 2006 @ 9:46 am

  12. Lovely theme, great work. Thanks for sharing :)

    Reply Comment by Leanne — November 24, 2006 @ 6:13 am

  13. Thanks for your theme , desde españa un saludo , yo no pongo nofollow :)

    San román Electro House

    Reply Comment by San Román — November 28, 2006 @ 11:51 am

  14. Hey Roy,

    Great theme! Thanks a bunch for putting time into it. I only found one bug so far that i thought i would bring to your attention. When a comment is posted it goes over and into the right column and I wasn’t sure how to fix it :) . You can see an example here…

    http://www.coolcarguy.com/archives/49

    Thanks again! Very nicely done and thanks for sharing :) .

    Reply Comment by John Boyd — December 6, 2006 @ 11:47 pm

  15. @John: The comment on that page gets ‘stuck’ behind the floating image. Add something like
    .feedback { clear:left; } to the stylesheet to fix this.

    Reply Comment by Roy — December 6, 2006 @ 11:57 pm

  16. Thanks for hte theme, I’m using it!

    Reply Comment by Andrew — December 28, 2006 @ 2:11 pm

  17. Just wondering if this little beauty supports the Sidebar Widgets at all ?

    Nice work by the way the theme looks sweet

    Reply Comment by Jimmy — January 27, 2007 @ 2:28 am

  18. I’d like to use your WordPress theme for my site but I would like to change the Green to a pale blue or other colors as needed due to subject matter on the site. Is there a way to do this? I was looking at the css files but can’t see anything I want to mess with. Is there a way to do this??

    Reply Comment by James Coats — February 11, 2007 @ 9:47 pm

  19. I started using your WordPress template today and it works great!!!

    Well, except for one little thing…

    I took out the Flash info and defaulted to just flower.gif. This displays fine on Safari Mac but on Mac Camino and Firefox, the header h2 info gets stuck under the flower.gif. I’ve tried adding a clear div underneath the h2 heading but I haven’t had any luck.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    And thanks again for such a beautifully designed template!

    Reply Comment by Chris — February 18, 2007 @ 10:07 am

  20. Sorry – just solved my own problem by adding a bottom margin to the header image.

    Thanks again!

    Reply Comment by Chris — February 18, 2007 @ 10:57 am

  21. Wanted to thank you once again for this great theme. :) While replying to a comment in my blog I pasted a very large URL and was thrilled to see that it gets cut off instead of breaking the width of the entire page. Just another bit of evidence that the theme was designed by someone with experience.

    I’m intrigued by the idea of adding widgets. Any tips for someone who has customized your original design and is interested in upgrading to the next version of your theme?

    Reply Comment by Brian — April 12, 2007 @ 2:16 pm

  22. Well, if you’ve not done too much work on the sidebar.php, copying that and the new functions.php file should get you widgets support. Then add any modifications from your old sidebar.php.

    Reply Comment by Roy — April 13, 2007 @ 9:01 am

  23. This is a great theme, clean and simple! :)
    I’m using this one, have changed some colors only and made a personal flash animation.

    Thank you for this theme!

    /Phantom Mana

    Reply Comment by M.Håkansson — June 28, 2007 @ 10:31 pm

  24. So nice. I’m glad of found you.
    Follow thus!
    (Sorry by my English)

    Reply Comment by Victor Montes — January 25, 2008 @ 10:24 am

  25. Thank you for the Tranquility Theme!

    It is a very nice design… clean and simple.
    I didn’t make any changes and just used it as you designed it.

    Reply Comment by Michael — February 5, 2008 @ 3:09 am

  26. Sorry, it is me again,

    I just forgot to ask which social bookmarking plugin do you use for these theme?
    I mean just the one you have on this page.

    Best regards,
    Michael

    Reply Comment by Michael — February 5, 2008 @ 3:11 am

  27. I use the Sociable plugin (http://push.cx/sociable). It’s got tons of predefined sites and you can easily add your own.

    Reply Comment by Roy — February 5, 2008 @ 9:25 am

  28. Thank you very much!

    I am going to use it on my blog at http://www.2009e.de

    Best regards,
    Michael

    Reply Comment by Michael — February 12, 2008 @ 5:20 am

  29. Thank you for this theme!
    Do You have a plan update this theme for WP 2.7 & new comments system?
    Greetings :)

    Reply Comment by arcy — December 26, 2008 @ 6:27 pm

  30. Hi Arcy. Unfortunately I have no plans to update any of my themes. I’ve been forced to balance my time between client work and my themes and plugins. With the recent success of WP-Cumulus, that has pretty much taken up all my available time. As a result I’ve had to let go of a few projects, including the Tranquilitiy theme.

    Reply Comment by Roy — December 27, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

  31. Hi Roy… I LOVE your theme and it has been commented on a number of times over at Arukiyomi, my book blog (follow my link). However, I can’t get avatars to display in my comments. I’d like them to display exactly as you’ve got them here in this page.

    I’ve tried using the gravatar plugin but it places the avatars under the comment and I can’t seem to get it out from there. SO, despite having avatars enabled in the discussion options, they don’t appear at all as you’ll see if you click on a post with comments like this one.

    if you can lend any help with this, I’d be grateful

    Reply Comment by Arukiyomi — June 30, 2009 @ 7:37 pm

  32. sorry… forgot to add that I was wondering if this can be easily made into a three column blog?

    Reply Comment by Arukiyomi — June 30, 2009 @ 7:48 pm

    • Hi Arukiyomi. This theme was designed to work with WordPress 1.5. Back then, gravatars weren’t even invented, nor were tags and many other features. Because so many things changed I had to give up on updating a while ago. If you’re looking for a theme with more features I suggest you look for a more recent one.

      Reply Comment by Roy — July 1, 2009 @ 8:11 pm

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