I don’t know how many of Pat’s themes I’ve ported now. It’s a few. He seems to do designs that appeal to me. I’ve tried to maintain his original design whilst employing some neat Textpattern tricks and a limited number of plug-ins.

This theme will only work with Textpattern 4.0.7 or above. I make no apologies for that. The theme makes use of the new “tags-within-tags” ability of the latest parser. It also uses the new tags <txp:variable />, <txp:if_variable>, <txp:if_keywords> and <txp:modified />.

With the exception of <txp:if_keywords> all the above tags are used in the “meta-data” column for the articles in the “articles” section.

The <txp:variable /> and <txp:if_variable> tags are also used in the meta data for comments.

The <txp:if_keywords> tag is used for the “meta keywords” element in the “head” of the page. The “meta keywords” element will only be displayed in “individual_article” view and only if there are keywords entered for the viewed article. They can be entered into the “Keywords” field under “Advanced Options” as a comma-separated list. My current understanding is that Google takes little notice of keywords, due in no small part to all those sites that “cheated”. Over-zealous use of keywords can be detrimental to your site’s ranking rather than an asset so be careful how you use them.

If you select “About” or “Contact” from the menu in the demo, the blue columns you see there are using “excerpts” instead of displaying meta data.

The top menu is part of the overall header structure so adding more options will increase the height of the whole header block. This might not be suitable for sites with a multitude of sections but the menu code could be moved into the sidebar or done as a horizontal nav. I’m sticking with the original intention here.

The front-page on this site displays articles in the sidebar that I have called “Asides”. They have their own section and can be given categories as well. On this site they use a category called “front-page-asides”. This gives the flexibility to call different “Asides” categories to different sections.

Plug-ins being used by the theme are “zem_contact_reborn”, “zem_contact_lang” and “pap_contact_cleaner”. You will also require “hcg_templates” as I am going to make this my first release for import by that plug-in.