I have been very busy in the last few weeks, many things to do. I needed to recharge my energy. And this is the result: a new design for my blog. I created this theme for fun, at least to keep my mood in balance, to bring my mood back to the other design work.
After upgrading to WordPress 2.7 few days ago, I wanted to have some changes here, especially by taking advantages from new features introduced in the latest WordPress, e.g. built-in threaded comment. Here are some notes on my new blog design.

Template tags

Still related to template tags, I try to take advantage from the way WordPress produces CSS selectors. Here is an example. Open index.php in default theme folder, you should see this for the entry loop:

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

The code above will produce something like this:
<div class="post hentry category-services category-sites category-www category-webdev tag-htaccess tag-facebook tag-linkedin tag-service tag-twitter tag-url" id="post-1026">
Do you see the pattern? It will produce some post classes on the entry data (categories and tags). This function is called post_class(). By this, we can customize how each entry (inside the loop) should be displayed, just work with the stylesheet.
If you want to make you theme compatible well with WordPress 2.7, just head to Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 article at WordPress Codex. There are some other useful information for theme designers — and also for you as bloggers.

Threaded comments

I decided to have a 3-level of comment depth — a parent comment with 2 sub/child comments. I can choose up to 10 levels of depth, but I think three is enough (for this blog).
I never use this kind of settings (threaded comment), so this is a new thing for me. Some WordPress users probably have this setting by Threaded Comment plugin. If you want to use this feature, using WordPress default template file will be the best option. I almost keep the original comments.php for this design. Use WordPress default theme, try the threaded comment and view the HTML output. From there, it’s your turn to tune up the design by working on the stylesheet.

Plugins

I disabled many plugins since I do not use them on my theme. I did not delete them, just deactivated them. If I need them again, I can simply activate them. About RSS parser, I do not use SimplePie for WordPress this time. I use WordPress built-in RSS parser. It works without any problems. So, this time I use less WordPress plugins.

Conclusion

WordPress 2.7 will bring many advantages for theme designers and also bloggers related to blogging activity or design stuff. For some people it might take time to learn many new features. But, it will also trigger creativity at the same time. I will make some minor changes on this site. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know using the comment form.