Important

Unlike other blogging engines the Serendipity designers have produced two different modes of displaying comments, either linear or threaded. Linear mode displays all comments in the order they were created, whereas threaded mode allows the comment author to select a parent comment that their reply applies to. The inspiration for this came from the many forums and guestbooks in use today, and allows your blog users to see at a glance which conversations are generating the most interest.

Trackbacks to your entries are automatic with Serendipity and in most cases your readers will never need to use a dedicated trackback address (URI).

Are you writing a new theme for Serendipity? If so, comments and trackbacks can be arranged in many different ways by changing your CSS in the template stylesheet or by altering the Smarty Templating files. Continue reading "Comments and trackbacks"

Serendipity includes form elements within posts (comment form) and within sidebars (quicksearch, template chooser). As theme designers we should be aware of these and style our themes appropriately.

Form elements are input boxes, select drop downs, textareas, checkboxes, radio buttons, submit buttons etc. All of these elements are styled automatically by your browser, but can take on properties from their parent container. For this reason you owe it to your users to test them, and if necessary, to style them. Continue reading "Form elements"

The continue reading "post title" is a tricky little devil, and in the default theme has no extra styling. In fact it is just part of .serendipity_entry_body, however, blogging is deeply personal and every user has different needs.

You should notice that some of the themes on this site don't style the 'continue reading' byline so it appears directly after the content, often breaking the designers hard work.

My belief is that the entries.tpl needs to be amended and the continue reading code needs a <p> placed around it. I also tend to add an additional class to my byline so that I don't have to worry that my paragraphs elsewhere will be affected. Lets assume you add the <p>, your entries.tpl code could look like this,

<p class="continue_reading"><
a href="{$entry.link}#extended">
{$CONST.VIEW_EXTENDED_ENTRY|
@sprintf:$entry.title}</a></p>

Now simply create the following style in your stylesheet,

.continue_reading {
clear:left; }

This has the advantage of also allowing further styling, so you could for example change the color or add an image.

All of the images on this page are aligned right using media manager. I have deliberately added text around these images to space them out because otherwise they tend to ruin the page. Check out the photogallery to see it is possible to completely break a page. Continue reading "Images aligned right"

All of the images on this page are aligned left using media manager. If the two top images are sitting too close together adjust the margin or padding around them. If the second image is sitting to the right of the first image then you may wish to add a 'clear:left;' to .serendipity_entry_extended Continue reading "Images aligned left"

All of the images on this page are aligned to top using media manager. Notice the difference between images without a caption (left-aligned) and those with a caption (centered). Continue reading "Images aligned to top"

Serendipity blog comes with an excellent search tool that allows users to find all posts that contain a certain word within your blog. As theme designers we need to be aware of how the quicksearch plugin works, and how to style the results appropriately.

At some time almost every users has noticed that the quicksearch tool doesn't work as expected, often because it can't find a result for a word the user knows to be in their entries. The quicksearch function relies heavily on the a similar php function, and a design feature of the quicksearch is that a word that appears in every post should not produce any results, after all what is the point simply reproducing the archives page.

To test the two different results that a user will experience, try searching for 'pluto' and 'column', now search for one of these words spelt incorrectly. If your theme is fully compatible with serendipity blog you should be happy with the results.

Does your theme work well with the archives that ship with serendipity?

Many users (and theme designers) don't even know the archives page exists. Because so few of us actually use this page you might wonder if its worth the effort of styling. My personal feeling is that any Serendipity theme designer who doesn't support the archives page is limiting the potential audience for their theme. Sure the user could add the styling if they want it, but wouldn't it give you the satisfaction of knowing your theme was complete the moment you released it.

If your theme doesn't work correctly with the archives page don't feel too bad. The problem might be the smarty template files for the archives. There are two templates, entries_archives.tpl and entries_summary.tpl, and neither of these uses the same format as the entries.tpl to display the archives.

The entries_archives.tpl file is used to display the main archive page, the one with the blue horizontal line, while the entries_summary.tpl file is used for the short summary page viewed when you click the 'view topics' link. The 'view full' link simply opens the entries.tpl.