New BlogEngine Theme - Envision

Thursday, 24 January 2008 00:44 by 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

Currently rated 5.0 by 4 people

Currently 5/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

Tags:		blogengine, theme
Categories:		BlogEngine.NET \| Themes
Actions:		E-mail \| del.icio.us \| Permalink \| Comments (9) \| Comment RSS

Comments

January 24. 2008 05:40

thanks for this.
I tried to turn styleshout's Cool Water theme into a Blog Engine theme recently, but my lack of CSS skills meant I still haven't got it finished.

Mark Heath

January 24. 2008 05:41

Very slick looking theme!

Quick (lazy) question: how easy is it to change the sidebar color? Hopefully just a matter of changing the bgcolor?

Thanks in advance Jesse!
--Mike

BTW: any reason you don't use a custom slug to prevent a triple dash in your post's---URL?

Mike van Zandwijk

January 24. 2008 08:23

Mike,
Unfortunately, most of these 2 column designs use faux columns, and that color on the side is actually caused by background image. I really hate to use faux columns because it makes it a lot harder to change the color, but also because it can make it really difficult to change the width of the layout.

In the main theme for this site, I use javascript to extend the columns to make them equal height, and it works pretty well, but some people frown at javascript as part of your design, even if it is unobtrusive. So, if you want to take a stab at making Envision use the js, all the code is here.

I guess its as good a time as any. What's the communities feelings on that? Faux columns using a background image, or javascript to make equal height columns?

Of course, I know it can be done, but maybe I just need to take the time to figure out how to do it with css, like this guy. matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm

Jesse

jf26028

January 24. 2008 08:24

Mike,
Oh, and about the url. I dont know. Maybe I should do a better job at managing my urls. Thanks for the tip.

Jesse

jf26028

January 24. 2008 08:27

Mark,
Thats pretty interesting because I actually wanted to do cool water instead, but I got started on this one before I realized what I had done. Maybe Ill fire that one up here in the next day or so.

Jesse

jf26028

January 24. 2008 11:14

Fantastic work... my favorite yet!

Ian Suttle

January 27. 2008 14:41

Jesse,

Thank you for the quick answer. Perhaps I'll find a chance to update the sidebar color with just a simple background. Man, with so many cool themes released lately, it's hard to pick a definite winner for our BE.NET blogs ;)

Also thanks for the useful 3-column CSS article/tip!

My CSS skills are extremely rusty and I'd be embarrassed to share my BE.NET theme, I've created from scratch a few months ago. I struggle with relative/absolute positioning and end up with dirty workarounds.

Well, looking forward to your next masterpiece.

BTW: did you get my email a few days ago about PE.NET?

Mike van Zandwijk

January 28. 2008 12:42