It's some months since I updated this site - sorry to all you regular visitors, my difficult personal life has really got in the way of my themes and template work this summer. I've not completely neglected Serendipity but what time and energy I've had had been devoted to developing the Bulletproof template that's now part of the Serendipity v1.2 installation package.



For those of you who don't know, Bulletproof has been developed by Yellowled (Matthias Mees), myself and Don Chambers over the past few months as both a standalone template and a framework to build new templates for s9y. Bulletproof has been designed and developed to work in all browsers and comes with three coloursets to use or get you started on the way to design your own Serendipity template.

I'll not write too much about Bulletproof here as it has it's own website - go and take a look (if you've not already) at s9y-bulletproof.com.

Not all the work of the past few weeks has been commercial. I've been busy on the collborating with Matthias Mees (Yellowled) and Don Chambers producing a new 'Bulletproof' template which we have designed to make template configuration easier. We're hopeful that this template, when released, will form part of the Serendipity v1.2 default install package. I'm currently working on a couple of coloursets for the template whilst Yellowled and Don are doing the final IE bug blasting.

I've also had another theme in progress for some time which I hope to be able to release soon. You can take a look at it, in it's unfinished state, by selecting 'Depth' in the template chooser dropdown.

At the request of a user, I've produced a 3 column version of my 'Coffee Bar' theme which I've imaginatively named 'Coffee Bar 3'



It has all the same features as my original 'Coffee Bar' theme - it's just a little wider to fit in the extra sidebar.

You can download 'Coffee Bar 3' from my download area.

SPLAT! my new grunge theme and template is now complete and available to download.



SPLAT! uses standard the system fonts 'Impact' for XP users and 'Helvetica Neue condensed' for Mac OS X users and features Dynamic Text Replacement in the header - thanks to Stewart Rosenberger for his article on A List Apart. The DTR font is 21005 EURO from junkohanhero.com. The ink splats came from Tom Tirins' excellent collection. Thanks also to Suzanne at work for the input during development of the theme and for scanning all the other grungy bits and pieces!

SPLAT! is a Serendipity 1.1 theme with the navigation configurable in the style manager and is fully backwards compatible through v0.9. Static pages and special pages are also fully styled.

You can download SPLAT! from my download area. Comments and feedback welcome!

Some of you will have noticed a new theme in the template chooser.



SPLAT! is a new 'Grunge' theme that is still a work in progress. I'll be posting on the Serendipity Forum when it's finished but in the meantime I'll be interested to get some comments and feedback.

Update 23 Jan 07
Finished!
Dave

'Multi' is a new theme that uses the CSS3 'columns' properties for dividing the 'entries div' into 2 columns. These new properties are only implemented in Firefox currently but the theme works well with a single column for the entries in Safari and IE6.



Each entry title in the 'Multi' template is preceded by it's category in a 'filepath' style with white space replaced by underlines as are the homelinks in the header. As in my 'Square' theme and template, I've used the blockquote element as a 'pull quote'. The 'pull quote' highlighing is achieved by enclosing the blockquote contents in a span which has a separate class.

'Multi' also features a re-designed calendar

I started with the basic calendar code from ceejay's 'Chocolate Fudge' template and added a little style and inspiration from Veerle Pieters' excellent article on her blog 'A CSS styled calendar'.

'Multi' for Serendipity has a restyled admin interface, is configurable through the v1.1 style manager and is backwards compatible to v0.9

'Multi' is available to download from my download area.

In addition, I've also made a zip available for download here of the banner image as a .psd file with the text layers active, along with the font I used - Benny Blanco from dafont.com

I'd be interested to get some feedback on this style from other Serendipity users.

Square is a new Serendipity 1.1 theme inspired by the Design Observer - one of the many excellent design blogs out there in the ether.



Square is a 2 column, fixed width design with 2 sidebars on the right hand side. I've used the 'blockquote' element as a magazine style 'pullquote' as I feel this design lends itself to well to a magazine style blog or website. The menus are fully configurable in the admin interface for Serendipity 1.1 users and in the index.tpl for users of Serendipity v1.0 or less.

Select 'Square' in the tempate dropdown to take a look.
You can download 'Square' from my download area.

Added 8-10-06
Yellowled on the Serendipity forum suggested I make the sidebars equal heights and extend them the full length of the page. This seemed like an excellent suggestion so I have implemented this in the theme and updated the zip. Thanks Yellowled - and thanks also to Carl for his helpful suggestions.

A Serendipity user emailed and asked if I could make a fixed width version of my 'Coffee Cup' competition entry theme. So here it is 'Coffee Bar' - my competiton entry but fixed width with a single sidebar and a navigation bar.



I named it 'Coffee Bar' as it has 3 CSS variations. 'Coffee Cup' - in all the original colours as you see above, and two new colourways 'Cappuccino' and 'Espresso' shown below.



'Coffee Bar' is fully configurable in the Serendipity v1.1 style configurator and is fully backwards compatible defaulting to the blue 'Coffee Cup' stylesheet in version 0.9 and 1.0. Thanks to Már Örlygsson for the menu code.

You can download 'Coffee Bar' from my download area.

If you're using Serendipity version 0.9 or 1.0 you can use the 'Cappuccino' and 'Espresso' CSS files and configure your menus by editing your index.tpl file. Click on the 'Continue reading' link for instructions.