Facebooked: WordPress Theme

This theme is no longer available for download.

Version 1.2.1 Updates

  • The rendering of the arrows that expand/collapse the arrows was a little off in Internet Explorer 6, but the issue has been resolved in the current version.

Thoughts

I started this project some four or five months ago. No, I haven’t worked on it that long because I hit a bit of a brick wall—How in the heck do I manage to have expanding/collapsing sidebar elements and save the state with cookies? So, I gave up.

At the time, I was trying to use jQuery, and it worked fine for the expand/collapse feature. However, I couldn’t figure out how to use cookies with it. I’m no javascript coder. Nope, I’m XHTML, CSS, and a little PHP.

Around that time, N.Design Studio released the iTheme using Brothercake’s Docking Boxes Script. I didn’t want to go that route.

I don’t think Facebook had implemented the movable boxes yet. They only had expanding/collapsing boxes.

Jump forward a few months. I’m in South Korea and off work for a week during Chuseok. No plans. Plenty of time on my hands.

I decided to use Brothercake’s script since Facebook now had movable boxes. Most of the design work had been done back when I started, so all I had left to do was put the thing together.

After many long hours of work (I haven’t been in the theme-designing game for a while, so I’m a little rusty), I finally got this thing working. I’m sure there are some bugs, and you should definitely let me know about those. The theme was tested on Wordpress 2.1 also.

There are a few things I wish I could’ve done. In particular, I wanted to put a menu across the top of the page, but saw problems with my header. Because I aligned the header to the right, that could possibly leave little room for people with long blog names. This is also why I didn’t put the title in the tiny area above the left sidebar.

I can see many ways in which someone could customize this theme. There are a lot of possibilities, and I wanted to throw in each one of them. But, I decided to keep it as simple as possible and let the user customize to their desire.

This is, by far, the most heavily coded theme I’ve released. The Brothercake script isn’t huge, but it’s a few more kb than I would have liked.

The idea for this theme came shortly after I released the Facebook-Mimic Theme for MySpace. I actually wouldn’t have put this theme together if I had just thought of it now because I think Facebook has gone down hill by allowing users to flood their pages with applications. But, it needed to be finished.

If you have any problems, feel free to let me know about them. I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can. But, please be sure to read the “readme.txt” file first. Some things can be solved by just glancing at that. So, enjoy.