Hello, I'm Chris Murphy — I specialize in creating engaging, user-centric interactive experiences.

farfromfearless with a Lemon Twist

By: Chris Murphy

So while everyone is reading the last book in the Harry Potter saga - including my wife at the moment who is parked on the couch with a copy we purchased last night at Chapters (midnight) - I am dutifully launching the latest installment of me WordPress themes: Lemon Twist.

It has been a pleasure to hear from many of you folks who have downloaded the Lemon Lime theme, and it has been a great encouragement for me to develop the theme you see here. With that said, there were a few things I wanted to accomplish with this theme, which I was not able to fully accomplish with my last theme – namely the following:

1. Clean Mark-up to support SEO;
2. Greater focus on legibility of written content;
3. Hack-free – installable theme without the need to tweak the WordPress core;

In any case, I feel that Lemon Twist accomplishes those design and development goals. While I was tempted to deviate greatly from my earlier theme, I wanted to ensure that there was some continuity between themes and each new release of this series will appear as an evolution of a concept rather than a scrap-and-rebuild exercise. On a side note, I am going to release this theme in three colors schemes according to some of my favourite ice-creams:

1. Brown/Orange/White – Orange Chocolate;
2. Brown/Pink/Vanilla – Neapolitan;
3. Red/White/Orange – Strawberry;

I have done my best (thanks to Jon Snook for the input) to ensure that the mark-up for this theme is symmetrically correct, compliant and degrades gracefully. As a forewarning to those viewing this theme – it does make heavy use of PNG’s (almost exclusively) – all of which I am currently optimizing for IE and other browsers. I spent a considerable amount of time attempting to develop this theme using traditional image formats, however they did not lend well to what I wanted to accomplish with this design. Long live PNG’s.

Unlike my previous theme, I will not be releasing it to the public until it is in a satisfactory state – meaning bug-free, and truly compliant.

In the mean time, bear with my while I setup my photo-gallery and other widgets.

farfromfearless

Comments on This Post:

  1. Imre
    Date: July 21, 2007
    Time: 1:58 pm

    Hey Chris,
    Don’t know if you remember me, I asked you if I could use your theme for my Drupal blog, a few weeks back. I am almost done with converting the fine details. I can’t peek any longer on how you did it.. aargh.. ;-) . I love this latest installment though! Any chance of getting the updated files when you’re ready? Keep it up! Cheers

  2. Chris Murphy
    Date: July 21, 2007
    Time: 3:12 pm

    Hi Imre, I just took a look at what you did with the original theme and I think you’ve done an amazing job porting it over to Drupal. I’ve played with the system before but I can’t seem to get my mind around it’s templating system.

    In any case, I’m sorry I couldn’t provide a better basis for the code you’ve been working off of. It was one of my first attempts at doing a WordPress Theme.

    What were you trying to accomplish? I might be able to help you. Let me know

  3. Imre
    Date: July 21, 2007
    Time: 4:38 pm

    Hey Chris,
    Thanks for the compliments. Yes, it took some head smashing against the table before I managed to get everything straight. I have not worked with WordPress before. But looking at your php templates I can tell most elemental components, such as posting the creation date for example, has a lot in common. I am quite into Drupal these days, but I am not a php coder. So I needed to install some extra modules to get what I wanted, which is to copy your theme as closely as possible. So that’s what I am primarily focussing on. I am planning on adding a few things of my own sometime soon, but I don’t like the idea of porting something halfway and calling this a ‘port of the FFF theme’. There are some setbacks that require coding in the end I am afraid. For example, I cannot reproduce your setup of showing all blog items in one view, while showing the latest entry on top in fill, with different styling.

    But so far I was using your previous version along the side to see what styles were applied to what. Since Drupal generates different html, I had to reapply your styles to my html or add the Drupal id’s to your CSS. It’s easiest for me to peek at your live website, because analyzing and breaking down the php template files that you offered for download is a bit harder. But it will do.

    Don’t be sorry, I think it’s great that you’re offering your work to the public! I am grateful that I am able to use it. I am considering contributing my port to the Drupal folk, if that is still ok with you? (I need to find the time to write a proper read-me to go with it though)

  4. Chris Murphy
    Date: July 21, 2007
    Time: 5:22 pm

    Hi Imre, you could always setup a local installation of WordPress and set it up with my theme so you can preview while you work.

    I accomplished the the different style post for the most recent article by using the following logic:

    Store a counter “i=0″ while the postings are being generated;
    If i
    If i > 0 (which should be older postings), then output the generic format;

    That is essentially all it takes – I use the same methodology with this new theme as well.

    Please feel free to distribute the theme to the Drupal community – creds as necessary for yourself and my design :D

  5. James David
    Date: July 21, 2007
    Time: 10:51 pm

    I must say this is quite an amazing update and i love the theme, please release soon its so nice.

  6. Imre
    Date: July 22, 2007
    Time: 1:03 am

    Thanks for the tip Chris. I will try this out. I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I publish your theme :-)

  7. Andrew
    Date: July 23, 2007
    Time: 8:13 am

    Sweet! The tank conquers again!

  8. Henry
    Date: July 24, 2007
    Time: 9:05 am

    wow. great work, you don’t keep it for yourself but you share it to everyone, nice job and nice bro!thank you so much for your kind.
    i’m looking forward to seeing your release. day by day ^_^

  9. Ms. Farfromf…
    Date: July 24, 2007
    Time: 9:44 am

    The new layout looks great! Loving this one more than the last actually – especially the logo & illustrated trees/grass. Looking good! Just make sure you get permission to post those photos we were talking about :P

  10. Tudor
    Date: July 28, 2007
    Time: 5:35 am

    I love what you’ve done with the footer and comments! We’re all waiting for the theme release… Any chance for a three column version for the content-greedy?

  11. Rui Augusto
    Date: July 30, 2007
    Time: 11:41 am

    The Theme is great, but with IE6 it doesn’t look very well.

  12. gry
    Date: August 2, 2007
    Time: 3:34 am

    Thanks for the tip Chris. I will try this out. I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I publish your theme

  13. Uli Iserloh
    Date: August 3, 2007
    Time: 9:36 pm

    Chris,

    nice job on “Lemon Twist” … I came across your theme on http://www.clazh.com and I have to admit that as a designer, your design takes top honors.

    Anyway, just wanted to encourage you to release your design ASAP … even if you can’t get it to work perfectly on all the WinXP (FF, Opera, IE7, IE6, IE5.5) and Mac OS X (FF, Opera, Safari) browsers.

  14. Chris Murphy
    Date: August 4, 2007
    Time: 10:32 am

    Thanks for yoru comments Uli — This current theme is incomplete and not fully tested on a number of browsers, so until I’m satisfied that it’s realtively consisten on the majority of browsers, I’ll hold onto it for a while. Plus, I want to enjoy it as long as I can before sharing — greedy, I know.

  15. Nick Mayer
    Date: August 23, 2007
    Time: 5:30 am

    I must say this is quite an amazing update and i love the theme, please release soon its so nice.

  16. christine
    Date: August 29, 2007
    Time: 9:30 am

    Are there Lemon Twist demos available somewhere? Has it been released yet? I feel like I am missing something because I don’t see any download links to the actual theme.

  17. Ben
    Date: September 1, 2007
    Time: 8:22 am

    Great theme… I posted this comment earlier in the wrong place so my apologies…

    I’d like to show the latest TWO posts with their full preview instead of just the one. Then the rest listed as is.

    How can I do this? I’m fairly comfortable editing the code, I just can’t figure out how to do it with my limited php skills…

    Thanks!

  18. Chris
    Date: October 8, 2007
    Time: 12:52 pm

    Hey folks, if you’re looking for a more elegant approach to dealing with rendering the most recent posting different than the others, here it is:

    < ?php query_posts('showposts=1'); ?>
< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 < ?php endwhile; endif; ?>

    The above snippet will output only the recent post.

    < ?php query_posts('showposts=9&offset=1'); ?>

    The above snippet can be used to render the older postings. You can apply different styles to your postings based on this approach.

  19. borzack
    Date: November 7, 2007
    Time: 7:41 am

    I’m one of the people who uses your theme, and I must say your current theme is awesome!!!

    Can’t wait for it to be released :)

  20. Renata A. Tr…
    Date: November 22, 2007
    Time: 3:20 pm

    Hi Chris,
    I have just downloaded the FFF theme, and tried to install it using xampp, and it shows the following error message:
    “Fatal error: Call to undefined function the_excerpt_reloaded() in C:\xampp\htdocs\DrMarcel\wp-content\themes\Lemon_Lime_v1.0\sidebar.php on line 40″

    All the other themes I´ve tried to install are working but yours. Can you help me? Thanks :)

  21. Let’s …
    Date: November 25, 2007
    Time: 11:12 pm

    [...] UPDATE: I’ve since changed the name, added my wife as an author and changed to a theme by FarFromFearless. [...]

  22. Alex
    Date: December 19, 2007
    Time: 4:09 am

    Hi!
    Interesting discussion. I am a beginner.
    Useful honour.
    Thank you!

  23. José
    Date: October 21, 2009
    Time: 5:03 am

    Thanks for this great resource, like they said before, really useful for beginners !

  24. unibet.fr
    Date: December 13, 2009
    Time: 6:27 pm

    Excellent article, thanks !

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