Emptiness Header Images

First of all, my apology to Tony Lauria for making him wait for a long time and for not being able to upload these images earlier as promised. Life has been exceptionally busy, but I’ll save the details for another blog post.

It was a pleasant surprise for me to find out that Tony and some other Emptiness Theme users like to the header images from previous versions of the theme and requested their availability for download. Thanks so much for using the theme.

So here they are (in chronological order)…

Light greenish-yellowish leaves on tree branches in front of my home in Carnegie. This picture was used as the default header image from v0.1 to v0.9 of the theme.

A city-loop train with Crown complex in the background. This picture was taken from the Flinders St studio apartment where I lived back in 2005. I used the picture as a custom header image demonstration on a cleaner way to customise WordPress Theme styles using MyCSS Plugin.

Stones and water, which I thought represent the theme of emptiness really really well. The picture was taken at Korakuen Garden during my trip to Japan this year, and was used in v1.0 .

Weird grassy plants at Shinjuku Garden. In retrospective, I found the random pattern of the plants to be quite interesting. This picture was used in v1.1 .

Buildings behind the Shibuya Crossing at night (original 1024×768 image). I used this picture to test the custom image header cropping feature introduced in v1.1 .

A Cleaner Way To Customise WordPress Theme Styles

The most frequently asked question from Emptiness Theme users was about customising the styles (font, color, width, etc) and the header image of the theme, and I usually answered by giving them some pointers to which file to modify and where. The problem was that most WordPress users  would make the modifications directly against the theme files.

The downside of such approach is that the custom code would end up buried within the theme, which users won’t remember few months down the line. And this will then discourage them from upgrading the theme in order to avoid overwriting the customisations accidentally.

A cleaner approach to customise a theme is by isolating the custom code away from the original theme code. Having said that, I would like to encourage my theme users to start practicing this approach. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install MyCSS Plugin, read the documentation on how to use the plugin. Note: you might encounter an error complaining about ‘my.css file not found’, to fix this, you need to create my.css file under mycss plugin directory and give it a proper permission (644 will do).
2. When you need to customise a style, do it on my.css file. CSS code in this file will take precedence over the theme’s own style.css .

For example, to change the font-family of the sidebar headings, I added these lines to my.css file:

h3 {
    font-family: helvetica, sans-serif;
}

That’s it. I didn’t modify any of the theme code. The catch here is of course we have to be careful not to accidentally delete my.css file.

I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t have this custom CSS feature as part of vanilla WordPress installation. I think this would be very useful when they finally provide easy theme upgrade just like the way upgrading plugins is done.

As for MyCSS Plugin itself, it would be nice if it allows me to customise the location of my.css file so I can put it external to the plugin directory. And how about storing the content of my.css in the database so it can be persisted between plugin versions? Another nice improvement would be to provide the ability to upload files, handy for custom images.

100+ Custom Emptiness

Five months since v0.1 was released, Emptiness Theme has been downloaded 5,867 times and given 4/5 stars average rating. Not bad. Even though it’s not as popular as other themes with fancy graphic design, I think Emptiness has its own target audience with it’s simplistic style.

I’m particularly happy to find (via Google search) more than 100 blogs using Emptiness Theme with customised header image and some with customised css. Check them out on my Picasa Web album.

I used Nautilus Image Converter to resize all images via a simple select all, right click, and resize. If only it also has an auto image quality compression then it would be perfect.