Maybe we can get Mr Papa to skin a version of this theme for Simple Forum. It would also be fairly easy to add a bbPress template (now that I’ve worked on putting a bbPress template together for this site).

I’m not up on what the most popular gallery plugins there are though.

i agree that keeping things light is a great idea. I also agree with not making a gallery or forum an integral part of the theme.

my suggestion was more on the lines of picking one or two, looking at how to skin them or pull them in to be cleanly compliant with then new theme.

Dennis
I’m not even sure how to do the opacity thing but like to give it a try as long as it’s valid XHTML. Sliding doors won’t be too hard. Thanks for the input. I like your thinking.

DeFries
Ad input will definitely be an option from the admin panel now. I’ve been working on a few solutions to allow for Adsense or standard 125 x 125 px ads.

I’m still thinking of ways to allow for different category templates. I do have a few ideas on how this could be useful. In my Structure theme, there are three different home page layout options, so users should have these kind of options with categories too.

This is why I really like the tag feature of WordPress now — we can create these sideblogs without having to waste an entire category on it.

I’m right there with you in terms of color styles. I’m almost 100% certain that we should just offer different color styles.

Tabbed separation between comments and trackbacks and pingbacks coming up. I actually wanted to do this with my last theme but got a little lazy by the time I got around to it.

I’ll make sure it’s easy to translate. I’m still learning about translation, so it should be fun getting everything ready for it.

Thanks for all your feedback.

Howard
I’ll definitely be using many of the functions that I’ve written for Structure to build this theme.

I’m thinking of some different ways that we could offer different page layouts.

I’ll definitely consider adding in some options for extra features, such as multiple tabs and ad slots.

I don’t think a forum or photo gallery plugins are really fitting with this project. Those are really separate entities that usually have to be hacked a bit to work with any theme.

I’m not really up on what plugins are available, but it would seem that there are plugins that pull feeds into your site, isn’t there?

Thank you so much for your advice thus far. I hope you continue to keep the ideas coming until we finish the project.

krishna
Thanks for your advice. As I mentioned to Howard, I don’t see integrating a gallery plugin as a good option, unless enough people bug me to do it.

Do you know what the best gallery plugins are, krishna or Howard? Maybe if there’s one with little CSS, XHTML, and/or PHP customization involved, then it would be easy to implement.

My main goal is to keep the code as light as possible while offering as many features as we can come up with.

thanks for a great theme like structure. its unbelievably customisable. it has most features anyone can ask for. If its possible please integrate any of the gallery plugins into the theme such as nextgen gallery which can show related images based on the category similar to related posts plugin.

Some of the best aspects of your structure theme:

custom fields (thumbnail, feather post, feature image) make it very easy for a non technical writer to maintain the site and control visual layout.

tabbing allows tremendous efficiency of bringing lots of content forward to the user in a very confined space.

your vidow tag/video box on the front page makes inclusion of video super simple.

fixed column widths and a predetermined page layout, guarantees a consistant page look across various browsers and screen widths.

You could allow your users tremendous flexibility in two ways:
1. Given the basic page elements that make up the toolkit(feature article, category tabs, tabs, ads, video, recent posts) etc. you would do your users a favor if you offered several alternative page layouts. eg. with structure, there could be a structure1 that had the video top, front and center, moved the recent articles up to the right or whatever etc. You users can easily learn how to identify the elements in their posts, but can potentially break the design when they try to change the geography.

2. Give the user the ability to easily have more than one copy/version of a feature. For example, Tabs, Tabs2, Ads, Ads2
Categories-tabs, Categories-tabs2 etc. so that a user can easily expand on the tools with minimal php/css knowledge. Won’t add to overhead if you ad the extra code to another php with instructions on how to move them in and out of the proper files, or they could exist inline and be commented out.

3. It would be useful to have some industry standard ad units defined in interesting spots on the page layout. EG. (using structure as an example) a placeholder for inserting adsense code or doubleclick code in the header, under the navbar, under the feature, under the video, in the sidebar, in the footer etc.

4. Some of the feature plugins that are useful are a forum (we are using Mr. Papa’s simple forum and are very pleased). A managble photo gallery, we’ve looked at gallery2 and are testing the popup gallery we found on stuff.yellowswordfish.com (where mr. papa manages simple forums).

5. Since so many other services or sites can provide their content feed by rss/xml, it would be wonderful if we could populate a page or a box with styled input from an outside rss feed. EG. site a: i want to grab the googlenews feed on a subject, or a medline newsfeed etc. and have that data populate a page or a box similar to your existing “recent posts” box.

p.s. built in option to edit your comment would also come in handy

To answer your questions.

Do you think a way to input ads in the administration panel would be the way to go?
That would definitely be my choice. I mean, if you’re aiming for a flexible theme than an easy way to change ads thru an admin tab of the theme would be the way. Also a lot of people who don’t know the first about code get very anxious when the have to edit it.

A different layout or style for each category is near impossible for a template though because there’s no way of knowing what categories each user would have.

I realize that, but a way to go around that would be to have the ability to assign a different css code to a specific category id. And do that for about 3 – 5 categories.

The sideblog feature is definitely a good idea (or “asides” as some call it).

Great. Simplest way would be to use a specific tag like you do with the feature in your awesome Structure Theme!

Do you think it would be better to offer multiple styles in terms of color or allow the user to pick individual colors?

I believe a designer should take some control and if I had your skills I would offer a couple of color styles and make it easy for the users to alter them. Either via an admin menu or just have them tweak the CSS.

What do you consider to be the most popular plugins (other than FlickrRSS, of course)?

Mmm, difficult one to answer, but my guess would be at least Gravatars, FlickrRSS, Feedburner, Related Posts.. ahhh.. the list could go on and on..

Also.. the tabbed separation of the trackbacks and regular comments as option would be nice too, as well as the paged comments as you offer here.

Back to you