Over the Labor Day weekend, I got a wild hair and decided to dig out the theme Design Adaptations first sported, give it a revamp, and release it as a public theme. What started as a whim turned into an all-out obsession to make it a cleaner, more flexible and road-worthy theme. I guess you’ll let me know if I succeeded. :)

Starting with a sketch, I “wire-framed” it via Moleskine. I wanted the color scheme and layout to remain fairly consistent with the old look, but I knew the CSS was a total mess, and the former layout was marked up in such a way that wasn’t very scalable. So I tossed it.

The revamp sketch:

Using my baseline theme, and referencing Brian’s Vertigo when I got stuck, the code should now be easily modded by beginners, and a breeze for old hands. The CSS is heavily commented, and the design visuals kept to a minimum for those who want to let their own imaginations take over.

The final product:

View the demo…

Noteworthy:

Brushed Blues Revisited has been thoroughly stripped and whipped into shape. Sounds kinky eh? ;) Some of my favorite features include:

• multiple widget-aware sidebars for home, Pages and single entries
• a non-duplicating ‘recent entries’ segment for index.php
• custom search widget, styled to fit the theme whether you use the hand-coded search or the widget
• differentiated author comment styling
• configurable number of entries to display on index, without having to change it in your options panel.
  (This is useful if you want your search and archive pages to return say, 5 results, but you only want the home page to show the most recent entry).
• designed for use with a Flickr plugin (not required). To forgo the Flickry goodness, just comment out the div on index and single.php. The neighboring block of content will fill in nicely. I use FlickrRss, but there are several others available.
• native support for UTW – just uncomment to show related entries on single post pages

Known Issues:

The default Recent Posts widget, when used with the single.php sidebar, forces comments to disappear. After exhaustive searches through the WP codex and support forums, I still came up with nada as to why. It works fine on all other pages. If anyone who uses this theme figures out a fix, please do share!

Observances

This theme is licensed under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, and is being distributed here on Design Adaptations only. I humbly request that you leave the footer link intact, since it is considered good form to do so.

Bug Hunting

I’ve learned a lot since the release of my first public theme, and that process continues. Let me know if you come across any theme weirdness. Your feedback will help me improve this and subsequent themes. That means better products for you! Bug fixes will be listed in a Change Log below. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Download Brushed Blues v2.0