Yes, another BlogEngine theme.  Yes, I know more stuff than how to theme BlogEngine.  No, this has not turned into a BlogEngine only blog.  Fortunately, I am really into design mode these days, and it shows by the number of BlogEngine themes that I have put out here in the last few weeks.  The latest release is Natural Essence which was originally designed by Arcsin and can be found here.  Even though the inspiration for the theme came from Arcsin, and it looks almost identical, the underlying markup is the same as Envision, which I released last night.  So, the implementation is completely custom, and I am still going with my attempt to use the same markup on as many different designs as possible.  It may not mean much to you, if you are just looking for a quick BlogEngine theme, but it makes the design process more interesting, to me, at least, and it opens up a lot of customization opportunities down the line, but I will give you more details on that in a later post.

I think this will be the last conversion theme I do for a while.  I will probably do a few completely custom themes next, unless I find a design that's really hot that I just feel the need to work on.  And, I am curious if any of you have any suggestions on what kind of designs you might like to see here.  No promises or guarantees, but I am interested in what you may be looking for in a BlogEngine theme.  Feel free to drop me a line in this post, or on the contact page.

So, enjoy the theme, and drop me a line if you come up with any issues.

Download

Preview

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I have had enough fun for a while with my previous experiments with BlogEngine, and after watching a few of my friends jump on the theming bandwagon lately, I decided it was time to finish up some of my more functional themes that I have been wanting to release.  Envision is the first of a few themes that I plan on releasing for BlogEngine that all use the same markup for the layout, but rely on different styles for the design.  Hopefully, all the future themes that I release in the next few days will all be universally coded, and you could then enable the user to switch them out, just like you can with ThemeEngine.LayoutGala or ThemeEngine.NFL.

Envision was originally designed by styleshout, and was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which is a really permissive license.  More details are here.  And, all the BlogEngine enhancements were released BSD style, so you can do whatever you like.

And, as always, drop me a line or drop a comment if you find any issues with this theme.

Download

Preview

Jesse Foster | jf26028

BlogEngine has been increasing in popularity, and it shows by the number of quality themes that have been released lately.  Adam Zastawski released a conversion of the Marketplace design from styleshout.  It's a very crisp and clean theme, supporting 3 columns and a clean, traditional layout.  It is a great theme, and Adam has made his work available for download for free, so check it out.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Jason Lay has adapted StarGazer from FreeCssTemplates.org, and made it freely available to download and use on your BlogEngine installation.  It's a really sharp theme, and Jason did a great job on it, so head over to his blog and download it now.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Introducing ThemeEngine.NFL, an experiment in BlogEngine dynamic theming. 

I have been working on lots of ideas around BlogEngine lately, and I have found lots of themes that I would like to convert from lots of other places.  But, for the most part, I am pretty conservative when it comes to my blog design, and I tend to really like the 2 or 3 column pages, with a header, menu, and footer.  And, with that being the case, I thought it would be really easy to create a base structure, 2 column in this instance, and generate a whole bunch of color schemes for it, and let the visitors decide which they like the best.  And, with that idea, ThemeEngine was born, and built as a proof of concept.

After I got the initial structure and scheme defined, I just needed a bunch of color schemes to fill it out.  I needed a set that was big enough to prove the point, but not just a random set of colors.  Somewhere along the line, I decided to generate a color scheme for each team in the NFL.  Unfortunately, some teams have really ugly colors, and it reflects in the theme.  (Sorry Bills fans.)  This theme is not meant to be a perfect set of themes for all the NFL teams, but a base to prove what could be done with BlogEngine, so please forgive some of the unpolished themes contained here.

The visitor preference is set in a cookie, and is completely managed in the template, so no modifications to BlogEngine are required.  And, if you open the site.master.cs file, you can turn off the visitor selectable theme by setting the COOKIE_ENABLED constant to false, and it will use the theme in the DEFAULT_THEME constant.  Maybe it would be cool to build an extension to enable you to set these configuration values from the administration section of BlogEngine, but that's not available right now.

The following screenshots were all taken of the same theme, with a visitor-selectable color scheme.

Demo:  http://www.gravitycube.net/blog/?theme=ThemeEngine.NFL.1.0

Download:  ThemeEngine.NFL.1.0.zip

This opens up lots of doors for people running different kinds of blogs.  Say you ran a celebrity gossip blog, and you could design themes for your favorite celebrities and let the user pick their favorite while they browsed your site.  Or, if you actually did run a sports/NFL blog, this implementation would be great.  And, the same idea could be applied to all sports, or practically any other genre out there.  The options are limitless, and this is just one more example of how BlogEngine enables you to do whatever you want with YOUR blog.

Anyway, check out my experiment, and let me know what you think, or if you find any bugs.  And, please forgive some the lack of tuning on the actual designs. 

Special thanks go out to Adam Zastawski and Jason Lay for all their help and inspiration.

Jesse Foster | jf26028