This is a blog I’ve just set up to discuss my work with WordPress. I have just completed my first WordPress theme, ShadowBox and am excited to do more…
I hear you, next release will allow you to specify the height of the header area. For now, you’d need to specify your custom header image height in functions.inc.php:
As well, if you want the blog title to be centered, then specify padding-top in style.css:
.headertext a {
padding-left: 10px;
color: #003366;
font-size: 20px;
font-weight: bold;
padding-top: 15px;
}
Hi. Nice theme… but a couple of questions. I see no “Home” link when I’m on a different page.
I thought I could use the “Header Links: Custom” in ShadowBox Options… but I see no way of getting my own links in there. (I’m not a highly technical person, just somebody who is not afraid to do trial and error, and learn to mess with stuff a little.)
Hi Susan,
Unless you unchecked “Display blog title and description,” the blog title is a link back to the home page of your blog.
re: Header Links: Custom
You can add your own “header links” if Header links is “custom” by clicking on the “edit” link directly below (should see “no links defined…”
I’m playing around with your theme right now, and I think I might be using it on a couple of sites.
Regarding the Header, It would be nice If you could make the header Image link to the homepage when the “Display blog title and description” is unchecked. Would make sense for everyone that wants to make a logo headerimage.
Yeh, you’re right, header image link should definitely work whether or not you’re displaying blog title and description. I’ll fix this in the next release which I hope to get out in the next week or so.
Glad you like the theme otherwise. Next version has a lot of nice refinements.
Hi Kevin,
The theme does insert extra spaces around links to accommodate the “box” link style. I’ve reworked the link styles a bit in current version that may eliminate this extra spacing. I hope to publish a new release soon.
If you want to fix this yourself, do the following:
1. Edit functions.php
2. Search for “entry p a”
3. Remove margin and left and right padding
Hope this is helpful. Glad you like ShadowBox. I do plan to keep actively developing it.
That doesn’t seem to have done it. I removed it everywhere I could find it. Do I need to remove the part that says border as well? My php skills are definitely rudimentary, so I may just wait until a new release, as I said, I love the style and this is just a minor thing.
Hey, happy you think is great. If you can articulate what you don’t agree with, let me know… I definitively want to make this theme compatible with BuddyPress, just waiting til that codebase stabilizes.
I used iweb for my site and am now adding word press and your theme. I don’t know how to get rid of the “edit” box at the end of each post. Also, I have links in the right bar to pages on the main site. I have rated them 1-5, but cannot get HOME to show first in the order; although it is rated 1. I would greatly appreciate your help…I am new to all this. Thanks, Peg
Great you’re interested in using ShadowBox for your recipe site. Here are some answers to your questions:
re: Edit box
Only blog editors see the “edit box” that appears under each post. Thus visitors to your site will NOT see this box. In the same way only blog administrators see the “edit widgets” box in the sidebar.
re: Ordering Links in sidebar
I’m fairly certain that the “links” widget that is used to display your blogroll does NOT allow you to specify the order those links appear. This widget will allow you to display the rating of a given link, but has no option for ordering by that rating. For this I think you would need to install a plugin such as My Link Order
I hope to have a new version of ShadowBox available soon. This new version has cleaner styles, more theme options including an option for a custom background image.
Alex, I am having a hard time uploading a custom image as a header of my website.
First of all, let me just go thru the motions so that you know what I have done.
Went to media, add and browsed and picked an image from my computer. I uploaded and it was entered in my media library.
The programs tell me to visit the site and see it. It is there very nicely and on all the postings, but If I open my website in someone else computer is not there. Why?
So as I continue trying to understand the problem, I revisited my media library and I saw that the image have a blue “attach” suggestion.
When I click attach, a search box appears with two options: Post and Pages. I picked post and type all in the search box. A list of my topics came up, but it only allows me to pick one at the time. Anyways, at this time I am not even sure if this is the right way to get that image in my header box or is there something I am missing here. Please, please help me here. I am getting really confused.
I appreciate any help you can give me.
Thanks and have a great weekend.
Apologies for late reply. There’s a much easier way to get an image in your header. Log into your blog and go to Appearance > Custom Header. There you’ll find a field to upload an image for your header. Hope this is helpful.
I’m a newbie on wordpress.org, have had a little more time working on wordpress.com, but only know a bit of html and even less about style sheets, though I understand what style sheets do — haven’t used them very much.
How do I change the blog title “Chicago Tango.Info” to boldface in the upper left hand corner of the image on the home page of http://chicagotango.com. I tried to make the change by editing style.css changing font-weight: bold — see below, but that didn’t work.
I was able to see the correct results in Firebug and it’s what I want, but couldn’t figure out how to save it or figure out how to edit the DIV. Meanwhile, I’ve spent hours on bulletin boards trying to figure this out over the last 10 days. I understand that font edits can be tricky with style sheets, have heard about the need sometimes for child style sheets, etc …. but still can’t figure out what should be a quick fix. Help!! I don’t want to get rid of the “shadowbox” theme just to so I can boldface the blog title.
Yikes, now I really screwed it up..Blog is down. Can you help?
Changed one word in functions:php for one headertext parameter.
— changed “font -weight: normal;” to “font -weight bold;” and added comment so I knew what I changed. I got error message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /data/21/2/50/37/2050852/user/2246838/htdocs/WordPress/wp-content/themes/shadowbox/functions.php on line 1568
Put it back like it was originally and still got error message. Probably because of my foolishness since I tried to edit the php file as I would an html file.
Here’s the section of code I changed — in the 2nd to last line. I changed the word ‘normal’ to the word ‘bold’ then back to ‘normal’ again. No idea why it’s not working.
Sorry for late reply. Took me a bit of time to figure out why you were getting errors. The problem is that whatever app you used to edit the functions.php file (am guessing you used MS Word) converted double quotes to “smart quotes” (i.e. left and right version of quotes). Compare what you have above with this version:
.headertext a {
display: ".$options['show-header-text'].";
padding-top: ".$options['header-text-padding-top']."px;
padding-left: ".$options['header-text-padding-left']."px;
color: ".$options['header-blogtitle-color'].";
font-size: ".$options['header-blogtitle-size']."px;
font-weight: normal;
border-bottom: none;
}
We’re working on a blog (currently behind a password) using your theme. We’ve run into an issue where we used the header uploader to add an image to the site, but the image doesn’t appear in IE 7 or 8 (it looks like the style sheet for IE doesn’t know it exists). The image appears in Safari, Chrome, and FF. Any suggestions? Is there something we should modify in the style sheet? Thanks!
Fantastic theme with superior controls to any other theme I’ve seen; good job!
(Now, of course, comes the ONE little technical problem; it is the way of the techie, as our culture cannot survive without the ONE little problem.)
The title and body fonts are ignoring the CSS and are “stuck” at the default sets. Editing the (very well written and commented!) CSS has no effect. They stay Helvetica and small. I would like them to grow up into big strong Gill Sans, or even Gill Avec if they can manage it. Any suggestions as to how to get the PhP to not squish the wishes of the CSS. Headlines work great; only body tags appear to be the hapless victims.
Thanks for a GREAT theme and an even better interface for tuning it!
Hey your blog looks really great! Great idea too to document the building of your house, reminds me of Tracy Kidder’s book House.
I wanted to create an easy to use theme options UI but trade off was that it makes it a bit more difficult to tweak the styles. Essentially the theme UI allows you to set style properties that extend what’s in the style.css. Unfortunately, this means that changes to the style.css are overwritten by the theme UI.
Still is not too hard to make it do what you want. You just need to edit the functions.php file. In particular, the save_options function takes the theme options and adds them to a $variations_css variable. there you’ll find a subset of the styles from the style.css file including the body tag with font-family and font-size properties.
Well, I made the edits in the functions.php file, but the body text still appears in the default font. Firebug is showing that, just as you described, the CSS is superseded in the generated HTML. I’ll keep messing with it and see if I can figure it out.
Also, is there any documentation of how the links in the header are supposed to be formatted? I saw the question posed earlier in this thread, and I’m having the same issue. I can get my custom text into the header above the header graphic, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it into a link. When I put it in HTML form, the template strips out the angle brackets and quotes, so all my href tags get ‘detagged’.
Well, that’s really all I’ve managed to break so far, which means your template is pretty darn good, because I have a definite ‘gift’ when it comes to breaking code! I’m messing around with a plug-in to add a horizontal navigation menu set up above everything in the blog; so far I haven’t got it looking like I want it so it’s not posted yet, but I’ll let you know how that turns out.
Thanks again for a great theme, and for the kind words about the blog!
Hmm, I’m guessing you didn’t update the theme options after changing the functions.php. Clicking the theme update button will run the save_options function, save new values to the database. These then get loaded after the style.css.
re: header links
You’re right! Tags are being stripped. Sorry about… Let me review the code and see where this is happening…
Hi Kevin,
Quick note to say that in the latest version of ShadowBox (1.5.4) I’ve fixed the bugs in the custom header links so tags won’t be stripped out. I also added a “draft” variation that includes a graph paper background. See: http://blogs.middlebury.edu/fluency/
Hi Alex,
I found your blog site shawdowbox today and like the layout for my needs. Thank you!
I have one small question I can’t seem to get my custom header to work with IE. It is fine in Firefox and Safari. Checked on other computers as well, same gig. Cleared cookies, and Temps and rebooted, same gig. Uploaded fresh jpg, again same gig, and made sure to hide title on workpage. Thoughts?
Hi RJ,
Glad you figure out the problem, sorry I haven’t responded sooner. The header image should be on top of the area where the opacity is set. I guess IE handles this differently. Will see if I can figure out another way to implement this. Thanks for feedback
Hello Alex
i have troubles setting a background
I managed to put the image in the header and now i want to have it also as background
in the box i can see all is fine, but it doesn’t show in IE or Firefox.
i have no clou how to make this visible
Please tell me the secret
Thanks
Emmanuelle
Hi Emmanuelle,
Not sure I understand what you want to do. If you’re having problems seeing your header image in IE, then sent the opacity of the header area to 0%. If you want your header image to be the background image, you need to use background=custom and put in a url to the image.
I like your top menubar, have been meaning to create that sort of menu for pages. Will check out the plugin and maybe include as an integral part of the theme.
Hi Alex,
The header is fine, the problem is that i want the header image to be also as background, i did all as you say and i can see it is correct (in the box when i log in)
The problem is that the background is not visible on the actual website
I’am not sure how to explain the problem a differnt way..
Is there an email address i can send a screen shot to?
Thanks
Hi Alex, i left a message here yesterday, but it is gone, don’t know what happend.
I do hope you can help me out
It is still about the background, everything is set up fine as i can see in the box when i log in, it is just not visible online
I made the background orange for now, but it should be the same as the header image
Can i send you a screen shot per email so you can see what i talk about, and hopefully you can tell me what i do wrong, or perhaps there is a bug somehwere….
Let me know
Thanks
Emmanuelle
Hi Emmanuelle, apologies for late reply. If you choose the custom variation, you should be able to specify the url for your background image and then decide how that image is positioned and whether or not is repeats.
Hi Alex,
Yes i did all that
Background Image URL: images/backorange.jpg (pickture as in the header)
Background Repeat; repeat both
Background Position: Center Top
This should be correct right?
I see it is correct, i just can’t see it in IE (or any other internet provider)
I understand the problem now. The background Image URL requires a URL (e.g. http://www.soseventies.com/…), not a relative path. Here’s what I recommend:
Upload you background image to the media library
Copy the file URL for the image
Paste that URL into the background image url field
WordPress 3.0 now has functions for uploading background images. In the next release of Shadowbox, I’ll likely use this function. I’ll also likely add support for drop down menus like you created with the WP Menubar plugin.
Hi, Alex! Shadowbox is a really nice, clean theme, and I REALLY LIKE the “model” that the Options page uses. Wow, what a timesaver.
I think Peg, above, was asking about pages, not links. The website I will be using Shadowbox for is for my church website, and we’re in the middle of transferring the original domain. The main site is at http://www.onebreadonebody.org, and my blog will become the framework for the site now that I’m doing the whole thing. Eventually there will be a static front page – how do I remove the sidebars for just ONE page? Am I missing something, or is it possible in a future version that each page could have a customizing section, below the post section? I’m still in the middle of fixing the content on what will become the static main page, though. And will I be able to remove the comments box? Haven’t dug into the templates yet to see.
Thanks for making it so easy to adjust the sidebar and content width – and I like the clever “crop custom header” solution you came up with. This will make it really slick down the line when I’m ready to “cut over” the old site’s content to manage it in WordPress, as currently my blog is kind an adjunct to the main site.
Eventually, I’ll probably like to replace the static banner image with a dynamic Flickr banner/badge, a fun trick I used on a previous site I administered. Which template would I edit? Functions.php?
Hi Ginny, So sorry for late reply. Glad you like ShadowBox. Here are some answers to your questions.
re: Pages and Sidebars
Shadowbox has a number of different page templates. The default page template is with no sidebars. There are also page templates with just left or just right sidebars, or left and right… and so on. Not likely pages can have their own distinct sidebars any time soon. One page template called “widget page” will allow you to add “widgets” below the page content.
re: Pages and Comments
You can disable comments on any pages in the edit page UI
re: Banner/badge in header
If you decide to include banner/badge in the header, then you’ll need to edit header.php
Hope this is helpful. Hope to have a new version out soon with bug fixes and minor updates. Also working on a theme called “Translucence with you might like, allows you to add a custom background image and then set the opacity of foreground allow some of the background image to appear through the foreground
Me again – closer to done. Played around with the header.php to see what can be done. The Flickr badge wasn’t behaving well, probably due to some errant CSS, but may well end up with dynamic header images.
any plans for WP 3.0? I’m wondering if the template changes will be a problem or not…
Keep in mind the ShadowBox theme options override what is defined in the style.css.
re: WP3.0
I don’t anticipate major changes in the templates for WP3.0. Main change will be using the new custom background function instead of the one I wrote.
I have the Shadowbox theme in my WordPress.org blog. I went into the file, “Stylesheet.css” and under “body” changed the #ffffff to #66CC00, but once saved nothing changed. I am new at CSS. What am I doing wrong? Right show in one of the files that I have Shadowbox Version 3.0.3.2 as a sub and WordPress as primary.
ShadowBox has a theme options UI that overrides many of the styles defined in styles.css. Ideally the options UI (see: Dashboard > Appearance > Shadowbox Options) would have all the options you need to customize the appearance of your blog. You can change the background color to #66CC00 by choosing “custom” from the Variations drop down menu.
If you did want to make changes to styles that cannot be made through the UI, then you would need to edit the save_options function in functions.php. After you make your style changes there, you would need to go to the ShadowBox options and click the update button.
Carla,
The admin_header_style function should NOT be edited. Unfortunately, I cannot type in original version of this line here (because it contains executable code)… If you didn’t make a copy of the functions.php file before you changed it, I recommend you download a fresh copy of ShadowBox and replace the functions.php file you edited with the original one.
If you simply want to change the color of the background, I recommend you do the following:
Go to: Dashboard > Appearance > Shadowbox Options
Chose Variation = custom
Put in #66CC00 in the background color field
Click on the Update button
Thank! Unfortunately I no longer have access to any of the files. I cannot even get into WordPress dashboard. I am working with WordPress to resolves this matter. All else fails I have to unload and reload WordPress and start from scratch. Thanks for all of the advice here and below. I will know what to do next time.
I was wondering if I wanted to change the color of the background in the left and right sidebars which option in the dropdown menu in the Theme Function file would I use.
I assume I would change the
$options_values[‘sidebar-color’]);
to
$options_values[‘red’]);
Sorry for late reply. if you wanted to make change the color of your sidebar to a color not listed in the UI, best to add the color you want to the list of options. Here are the steps:
1. Go to shadowbox/variations/default
2. Locate $options_values[‘sidebar-color’]
3. Add your color to the list (e.g. ‘Red’ => ‘#DF0101’)
It is important that you use the same syntax as other items in this array and that if you add to the end of the list, you be sure NOT to put a comma. Adding the option for red here will make this option available for all your “sidebars” including top and bottom bars.
I entered some CSS code in the top widget bar and it applied some stuff all over the background. I took the code out and it fixed everything, but removed the RSS images. Can you tell me how to get them back. Right now it just says, “RSS Posts RSS Feed”.
I wouldn’t recommend adding CSS code to the top widget bar… If you really need to change existing CSS, then I would do it in the functions.php “save_options” function. Within the save_options function look for comment “add theme options to the theme CSS.” Below this will be the CSS that get added after the styles.css.
If you decide you need to change this, be very careful (and make a copy of the original version). Any css line that contains a name preceded by a “$” is a variable that the theme options UI sets.
Ya, live an learn. At the time I wrote this I had access to the funtion file, but nothing else. Now I cannot access anything. I appreciate your timely support, as not all theme creators are this generous with their time. I’ll definitely recommend your theme to others!
Just wanted to let you and others know (mainly others). That this is the perfect website theme to fit inside a facebook iframe. This theme makes the sizing a piece-of-cake for people like me who are aware of how to use technology but need it to be easy and less time consuming. I wish every theme came with a layout option page like yours. Now I can start multiple fan pages and easily attach websites to tabs within the fan page. Here is my example. http://apps.facebook.com/cellphone-spyware/
I am busy converting my HTML site to WordPress using your Sandbox theme. Please look at the sub-pages (index.html still active in root) i.e. http://themarketingshop.co.za/about
In Firefox for Max and Safari the custom header picture shows up beautifully, but it is missing in IE8 – can you think what I must do to fix that. Also, changing options in the Admin section seems not always to save. The workaround is to activate another theme and immediately activate sandbox again. Maybe you can figure out how to fix that.
Also, my topbar does not show up. I have only the search widget and and FB-Autoconnect widgets in that box.
Lastly, in default I see the RSS visible, but mine is not. I see no setting to change.
Stunning theme. I intend to change all my blogs (50) to this theme, once I can figure out these minor issues.
Sorry for late reply. Not sure why custom header is not showing up in IE8. Check the opacity of the header area. The image should be on top of the background color, but not sure this is always the case in all browsers. Didn’t know options changes don’t always get saved. Any more detail about this issue you can send me would be helpful. The topbar is only visible on posts page… Looks like you set of the home page as a static page, but didn’t specify any page for blog posts…. To see the top bar and RSS feed links, specify a posts page in your Settings > Reading.
Thanks Alex, I’ll try and get back to you. The Post page will be more visible once I remove the index.html from my old site. I’ll go into some individual posts and put a link here if needed. Not sure I understand the “image should be on top of the background color”, but will try and play to see.
The saving issue is quite interesting. At first it saved quiet fine but as soon as I started the custom header portion it seized all saving. The workaround still works, but it’s annoying and as a developer I understand you want it fixed, so if I can figure more out about it I will let you know.
Hi. I need to have a larger than 70px custom header image. what parts of the php code will i need to change?
Version 1.1.1 of ShadowBox now includes theme option for larger custom header image. Thanks for asking about this.
I hear you, next release will allow you to specify the height of the header area. For now, you’d need to specify your custom header image height in functions.inc.php:
ln 88:
define('HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', 70);
ls 1150+:
.block_header {
background-color: ".$options['headercolor'].";
border-bottom: 1px solid ".$options['headerborder'].";
border-top: 1px solid ".$options['headerborder'].";
border-right: 1px solid ".$options['headerborder'].";
border-left: 1px solid ".$options['headerborder'].";
padding-top: 1px;
height: 70px;
}
As well, if you want the blog title to be centered, then specify padding-top in style.css:
.headertext a {
padding-left: 10px;
color: #003366;
font-size: 20px;
font-weight: bold;
padding-top: 15px;
}
Thanks for feedback!
Hi. Nice theme… but a couple of questions. I see no “Home” link when I’m on a different page.
I thought I could use the “Header Links: Custom” in ShadowBox Options… but I see no way of getting my own links in there. (I’m not a highly technical person, just somebody who is not afraid to do trial and error, and learn to mess with stuff a little.)
Hi Susan,
Unless you unchecked “Display blog title and description,” the blog title is a link back to the home page of your blog.
re: Header Links: Custom
You can add your own “header links” if Header links is “custom” by clicking on the “edit” link directly below (should see “no links defined…”
Hope this is helpful
I’m playing around with your theme right now, and I think I might be using it on a couple of sites.
Regarding the Header, It would be nice If you could make the header Image link to the homepage when the “Display blog title and description” is unchecked. Would make sense for everyone that wants to make a logo headerimage.
Thank you for a nice theme.
Yeh, you’re right, header image link should definitely work whether or not you’re displaying blog title and description. I’ll fix this in the next release which I hope to get out in the next week or so.
Glad you like the theme otherwise. Next version has a lot of nice refinements.
I notice both here and on my blog that this theme seems to insert extra spaces around links. Is that intentional? Any way to change that?
…And also wanted to say I love the theme and tried more than a few before finding shadowbox, which I has worked great for me.
Hi Kevin,
The theme does insert extra spaces around links to accommodate the “box” link style. I’ve reworked the link styles a bit in current version that may eliminate this extra spacing. I hope to publish a new release soon.
If you want to fix this yourself, do the following:
1. Edit functions.php
2. Search for “entry p a”
3. Remove margin and left and right padding
Hope this is helpful. Glad you like ShadowBox. I do plan to keep actively developing it.
Thanks! I’ll try that fix.
That doesn’t seem to have done it. I removed it everywhere I could find it. Do I need to remove the part that says border as well? My php skills are definitely rudimentary, so I may just wait until a new release, as I said, I love the style and this is just a minor thing.
Hi Kevin,
You shouldn’t have to remove borders… Be sure you remove padding and margins from all .entry css including:
.entry p a
.entry p a:hover
Hope to get version 1.2 out soon.
I somehow dont agree with a few things, but its great anyways.
Hey, happy you think is great. If you can articulate what you don’t agree with, let me know… I definitively want to make this theme compatible with BuddyPress, just waiting til that codebase stabilizes.
I used iweb for my site and am now adding word press and your theme. I don’t know how to get rid of the “edit” box at the end of each post. Also, I have links in the right bar to pages on the main site. I have rated them 1-5, but cannot get HOME to show first in the order; although it is rated 1. I would greatly appreciate your help…I am new to all this. Thanks, Peg
Great you’re interested in using ShadowBox for your recipe site. Here are some answers to your questions:
re: Edit box
Only blog editors see the “edit box” that appears under each post. Thus visitors to your site will NOT see this box. In the same way only blog administrators see the “edit widgets” box in the sidebar.
re: Ordering Links in sidebar
I’m fairly certain that the “links” widget that is used to display your blogroll does NOT allow you to specify the order those links appear. This widget will allow you to display the rating of a given link, but has no option for ordering by that rating. For this I think you would need to install a plugin such as My Link Order
I hope to have a new version of ShadowBox available soon. This new version has cleaner styles, more theme options including an option for a custom background image.
Hope this is helpful
Alex, I am having a hard time uploading a custom image as a header of my website.
First of all, let me just go thru the motions so that you know what I have done.
Went to media, add and browsed and picked an image from my computer. I uploaded and it was entered in my media library.
The programs tell me to visit the site and see it. It is there very nicely and on all the postings, but If I open my website in someone else computer is not there. Why?
So as I continue trying to understand the problem, I revisited my media library and I saw that the image have a blue “attach” suggestion.
When I click attach, a search box appears with two options: Post and Pages. I picked post and type all in the search box. A list of my topics came up, but it only allows me to pick one at the time. Anyways, at this time I am not even sure if this is the right way to get that image in my header box or is there something I am missing here. Please, please help me here. I am getting really confused.
I appreciate any help you can give me.
Thanks and have a great weekend.
Apologies for late reply. There’s a much easier way to get an image in your header. Log into your blog and go to Appearance > Custom Header. There you’ll find a field to upload an image for your header. Hope this is helpful.
I’m a newbie on wordpress.org, have had a little more time working on wordpress.com, but only know a bit of html and even less about style sheets, though I understand what style sheets do — haven’t used them very much.
How do I change the blog title “Chicago Tango.Info” to boldface in the upper left hand corner of the image on the home page of http://chicagotango.com. I tried to make the change by editing style.css changing font-weight: bold — see below, but that didn’t work.
h1, h2, h3 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif, Sans-Serif;
font-weight: bold;
border-bottom: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
}
I was able to see the correct results in Firebug and it’s what I want, but couldn’t figure out how to save it or figure out how to edit the DIV. Meanwhile, I’ve spent hours on bulletin boards trying to figure this out over the last 10 days. I understand that font edits can be tricky with style sheets, have heard about the need sometimes for child style sheets, etc …. but still can’t figure out what should be a quick fix. Help!! I don’t want to get rid of the “shadowbox” theme just to so I can boldface the blog title.
thank you,
Richard
Yikes, now I really screwed it up..Blog is down. Can you help?
Changed one word in functions:php for one headertext parameter.
— changed “font -weight: normal;” to “font -weight bold;” and added comment so I knew what I changed. I got error message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /data/21/2/50/37/2050852/user/2246838/htdocs/WordPress/wp-content/themes/shadowbox/functions.php on line 1568
Put it back like it was originally and still got error message. Probably because of my foolishness since I tried to edit the php file as I would an html file.
Can
Here’s the section of code I changed — in the 2nd to last line. I changed the word ‘normal’ to the word ‘bold’ then back to ‘normal’ again. No idea why it’s not working.
}
.headertext a {
display: “.$options[‘show-header-text’].”;
padding-top: “.$options[‘header-text-padding-top’].”px;
padding-left: “.$options[‘header-text-padding-left’].”px;
color: “.$options[‘header-blogtitle-color’].”;
font-size: “.$options[‘header-blogtitle-size’].”px;
font-weight: normal;
border-bottom: none;
}
Sorry for late reply. Took me a bit of time to figure out why you were getting errors. The problem is that whatever app you used to edit the functions.php file (am guessing you used MS Word) converted double quotes to “smart quotes” (i.e. left and right version of quotes). Compare what you have above with this version:
.headertext a {
display: ".$options['show-header-text'].";
padding-top: ".$options['header-text-padding-top']."px;
padding-left: ".$options['header-text-padding-left']."px;
color: ".$options['header-blogtitle-color'].";
font-size: ".$options['header-blogtitle-size']."px;
font-weight: normal;
border-bottom: none;
}
We’re working on a blog (currently behind a password) using your theme. We’ve run into an issue where we used the header uploader to add an image to the site, but the image doesn’t appear in IE 7 or 8 (it looks like the style sheet for IE doesn’t know it exists). The image appears in Safari, Chrome, and FF. Any suggestions? Is there something we should modify in the style sheet? Thanks!
Fantastic theme with superior controls to any other theme I’ve seen; good job!
(Now, of course, comes the ONE little technical problem; it is the way of the techie, as our culture cannot survive without the ONE little problem.)
The title and body fonts are ignoring the CSS and are “stuck” at the default sets. Editing the (very well written and commented!) CSS has no effect. They stay Helvetica and small. I would like them to grow up into big strong Gill Sans, or even Gill Avec if they can manage it. Any suggestions as to how to get the PhP to not squish the wishes of the CSS. Headlines work great; only body tags appear to be the hapless victims.
Thanks for a GREAT theme and an even better interface for tuning it!
Hey your blog looks really great! Great idea too to document the building of your house, reminds me of Tracy Kidder’s book House.
I wanted to create an easy to use theme options UI but trade off was that it makes it a bit more difficult to tweak the styles. Essentially the theme UI allows you to set style properties that extend what’s in the style.css. Unfortunately, this means that changes to the style.css are overwritten by the theme UI.
Still is not too hard to make it do what you want. You just need to edit the functions.php file. In particular, the save_options function takes the theme options and adds them to a $variations_css variable. there you’ll find a subset of the styles from the style.css file including the body tag with font-family and font-size properties.
Hope this is helpful.
Thanks Alex.
Well, I made the edits in the functions.php file, but the body text still appears in the default font. Firebug is showing that, just as you described, the CSS is superseded in the generated HTML. I’ll keep messing with it and see if I can figure it out.
Also, is there any documentation of how the links in the header are supposed to be formatted? I saw the question posed earlier in this thread, and I’m having the same issue. I can get my custom text into the header above the header graphic, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it into a link. When I put it in HTML form, the template strips out the angle brackets and quotes, so all my href tags get ‘detagged’.
Well, that’s really all I’ve managed to break so far, which means your template is pretty darn good, because I have a definite ‘gift’ when it comes to breaking code! I’m messing around with a plug-in to add a horizontal navigation menu set up above everything in the blog; so far I haven’t got it looking like I want it so it’s not posted yet, but I’ll let you know how that turns out.
Thanks again for a great theme, and for the kind words about the blog!
Kevin
Hmm, I’m guessing you didn’t update the theme options after changing the functions.php. Clicking the theme update button will run the save_options function, save new values to the database. These then get loaded after the style.css.
re: header links
You’re right! Tags are being stripped. Sorry about… Let me review the code and see where this is happening…
Hi Kevin,
Quick note to say that in the latest version of ShadowBox (1.5.4) I’ve fixed the bugs in the custom header links so tags won’t be stripped out. I also added a “draft” variation that includes a graph paper background. See:
http://blogs.middlebury.edu/fluency/
Hi Alex,
I found your blog site shawdowbox today and like the layout for my needs. Thank you!
I have one small question I can’t seem to get my custom header to work with IE. It is fine in Firefox and Safari. Checked on other computers as well, same gig. Cleared cookies, and Temps and rebooted, same gig. Uploaded fresh jpg, again same gig, and made sure to hide title on workpage. Thoughts?
Thanks,
RJ
Alex,
I found the issue. Header Opacity was set to 100% on white so the custom header was invisable on IE.
Have a great day, I will now that i figured it out.
RJ
Hi RJ,
Glad you figure out the problem, sorry I haven’t responded sooner. The header image should be on top of the area where the opacity is set. I guess IE handles this differently. Will see if I can figure out another way to implement this. Thanks for feedback
Hello Alex
i have troubles setting a background
I managed to put the image in the header and now i want to have it also as background
in the box i can see all is fine, but it doesn’t show in IE or Firefox.
i have no clou how to make this visible
Please tell me the secret
Thanks
Emmanuelle
Hi Emmanuelle,
Not sure I understand what you want to do. If you’re having problems seeing your header image in IE, then sent the opacity of the header area to 0%. If you want your header image to be the background image, you need to use background=custom and put in a url to the image.
I like your top menubar, have been meaning to create that sort of menu for pages. Will check out the plugin and maybe include as an integral part of the theme.
Hi Alex,
The header is fine, the problem is that i want the header image to be also as background, i did all as you say and i can see it is correct (in the box when i log in)
The problem is that the background is not visible on the actual website
I’am not sure how to explain the problem a differnt way..
Is there an email address i can send a screen shot to?
Thanks
Hi Alex, i left a message here yesterday, but it is gone, don’t know what happend.
I do hope you can help me out
It is still about the background, everything is set up fine as i can see in the box when i log in, it is just not visible online
I made the background orange for now, but it should be the same as the header image
Can i send you a screen shot per email so you can see what i talk about, and hopefully you can tell me what i do wrong, or perhaps there is a bug somehwere….
Let me know
Thanks
Emmanuelle
Hi Emmanuelle, apologies for late reply. If you choose the custom variation, you should be able to specify the url for your background image and then decide how that image is positioned and whether or not is repeats.
Hi Alex,
Yes i did all that
Background Image URL: images/backorange.jpg (pickture as in the header)
Background Repeat; repeat both
Background Position: Center Top
This should be correct right?
I see it is correct, i just can’t see it in IE (or any other internet provider)
I understand the problem now. The background Image URL requires a URL (e.g. http://www.soseventies.com/…), not a relative path. Here’s what I recommend:
Upload you background image to the media library
Copy the file URL for the image
Paste that URL into the background image url field
I just released an update to Shadowbox (v1.5.4), see:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/shadowbox
WordPress 3.0 now has functions for uploading background images. In the next release of Shadowbox, I’ll likely use this function. I’ll also likely add support for drop down menus like you created with the WP Menubar plugin.
Hi, Alex! Shadowbox is a really nice, clean theme, and I REALLY LIKE the “model” that the Options page uses. Wow, what a timesaver.
I think Peg, above, was asking about pages, not links. The website I will be using Shadowbox for is for my church website, and we’re in the middle of transferring the original domain. The main site is at http://www.onebreadonebody.org, and my blog will become the framework for the site now that I’m doing the whole thing. Eventually there will be a static front page – how do I remove the sidebars for just ONE page? Am I missing something, or is it possible in a future version that each page could have a customizing section, below the post section? I’m still in the middle of fixing the content on what will become the static main page, though. And will I be able to remove the comments box? Haven’t dug into the templates yet to see.
Thanks for making it so easy to adjust the sidebar and content width – and I like the clever “crop custom header” solution you came up with. This will make it really slick down the line when I’m ready to “cut over” the old site’s content to manage it in WordPress, as currently my blog is kind an adjunct to the main site.
Eventually, I’ll probably like to replace the static banner image with a dynamic Flickr banner/badge, a fun trick I used on a previous site I administered. Which template would I edit? Functions.php?
Hi Ginny, So sorry for late reply. Glad you like ShadowBox. Here are some answers to your questions.
re: Pages and Sidebars
Shadowbox has a number of different page templates. The default page template is with no sidebars. There are also page templates with just left or just right sidebars, or left and right… and so on. Not likely pages can have their own distinct sidebars any time soon. One page template called “widget page” will allow you to add “widgets” below the page content.
re: Pages and Comments
You can disable comments on any pages in the edit page UI
re: Banner/badge in header
If you decide to include banner/badge in the header, then you’ll need to edit header.php
Hope this is helpful. Hope to have a new version out soon with bug fixes and minor updates. Also working on a theme called “Translucence with you might like, allows you to add a custom background image and then set the opacity of foreground allow some of the background image to appear through the foreground
Me again – closer to done. Played around with the header.php to see what can be done. The Flickr badge wasn’t behaving well, probably due to some errant CSS, but may well end up with dynamic header images.
any plans for WP 3.0? I’m wondering if the template changes will be a problem or not…
Keep in mind the ShadowBox theme options override what is defined in the style.css.
re: WP3.0
I don’t anticipate major changes in the templates for WP3.0. Main change will be using the new custom background function instead of the one I wrote.
Hi Alex
Thanks for your help, i got it now…but not sure i like it as it is now…
Anyway, now i know how to do it.
Rgds
Emmanuelle
I have the Shadowbox theme in my WordPress.org blog. I went into the file, “Stylesheet.css” and under “body” changed the #ffffff to #66CC00, but once saved nothing changed. I am new at CSS. What am I doing wrong? Right show in one of the files that I have Shadowbox Version 3.0.3.2 as a sub and WordPress as primary.
Any help would be appreciated.
Just realized that I gave you the version of my Shadowbox JS. I am using the ShadowBox 1.5.4.
ShadowBox has a theme options UI that overrides many of the styles defined in styles.css. Ideally the options UI (see: Dashboard > Appearance > Shadowbox Options) would have all the options you need to customize the appearance of your blog. You can change the background color to #66CC00 by choosing “custom” from the Variations drop down menu.
If you did want to make changes to styles that cannot be made through the UI, then you would need to edit the save_options function in functions.php. After you make your style changes there, you would need to go to the ShadowBox options and click the update button.
Hope this is helpful.
Thanks for the advice, but being that I do not know what I am doing, I now have lost all access to my blog, including logging in through WordPress.
This is how I tried to edit the code:
function admin_header_style() {
?>
#headimg, .headerblock{
background-color: #66CC00; ?>
After editing the background color I clicked on ShadowBox Options and got the following code:
“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘:’ in /home/content/c/a/r/carlaspacher/html/wp-content/themes/shadowbox/functions.php on line 160”
I am in the Editor which I still have access to, thank goodness!
Carla,
The admin_header_style function should NOT be edited. Unfortunately, I cannot type in original version of this line here (because it contains executable code)… If you didn’t make a copy of the functions.php file before you changed it, I recommend you download a fresh copy of ShadowBox and replace the functions.php file you edited with the original one.
If you simply want to change the color of the background, I recommend you do the following:
Go to: Dashboard > Appearance > Shadowbox Options
Chose Variation = custom
Put in #66CC00 in the background color field
Click on the Update button
Hope this helps.
Thank! Unfortunately I no longer have access to any of the files. I cannot even get into WordPress dashboard. I am working with WordPress to resolves this matter. All else fails I have to unload and reload WordPress and start from scratch. Thanks for all of the advice here and below. I will know what to do next time.
Carla
Someone at WordPress fixed my sparse error and I have successfully changed my background color using the Dashboard. Thanks so much!!!
Hi again!
I was wondering if I wanted to change the color of the background in the left and right sidebars which option in the dropdown menu in the Theme Function file would I use.
I assume I would change the
$options_values[‘sidebar-color’]);
to
$options_values[‘red’]);
if I wanted red, correct?
Thanks,
Carla
Sorry for late reply. if you wanted to make change the color of your sidebar to a color not listed in the UI, best to add the color you want to the list of options. Here are the steps:
1. Go to shadowbox/variations/default
2. Locate $options_values[‘sidebar-color’]
3. Add your color to the list (e.g. ‘Red’ => ‘#DF0101’)
It is important that you use the same syntax as other items in this array and that if you add to the end of the list, you be sure NOT to put a comma. Adding the option for red here will make this option available for all your “sidebars” including top and bottom bars.
Hope this is helpful.
You also
Another problem I am having:
I entered some CSS code in the top widget bar and it applied some stuff all over the background. I took the code out and it fixed everything, but removed the RSS images. Can you tell me how to get them back. Right now it just says, “RSS Posts RSS Feed”.
This also caused my custom image header to disappear in IE.
I wouldn’t recommend adding CSS code to the top widget bar… If you really need to change existing CSS, then I would do it in the functions.php “save_options” function. Within the save_options function look for comment “add theme options to the theme CSS.” Below this will be the CSS that get added after the styles.css.
If you decide you need to change this, be very careful (and make a copy of the original version). Any css line that contains a name preceded by a “$” is a variable that the theme options UI sets.
Ya, live an learn. At the time I wrote this I had access to the funtion file, but nothing else. Now I cannot access anything. I appreciate your timely support, as not all theme creators are this generous with their time. I’ll definitely recommend your theme to others!
Carla
Hey Alex,
Just wanted to let you and others know (mainly others). That this is the perfect website theme to fit inside a facebook iframe. This theme makes the sizing a piece-of-cake for people like me who are aware of how to use technology but need it to be easy and less time consuming. I wish every theme came with a layout option page like yours. Now I can start multiple fan pages and easily attach websites to tabs within the fan page. Here is my example. http://apps.facebook.com/cellphone-spyware/
Thank you,
Jered
Glad you find the theme options useful.
I am busy converting my HTML site to WordPress using your Sandbox theme. Please look at the sub-pages (index.html still active in root) i.e. http://themarketingshop.co.za/about
In Firefox for Max and Safari the custom header picture shows up beautifully, but it is missing in IE8 – can you think what I must do to fix that. Also, changing options in the Admin section seems not always to save. The workaround is to activate another theme and immediately activate sandbox again. Maybe you can figure out how to fix that.
Also, my topbar does not show up. I have only the search widget and and FB-Autoconnect widgets in that box.
Lastly, in default I see the RSS visible, but mine is not. I see no setting to change.
Stunning theme. I intend to change all my blogs (50) to this theme, once I can figure out these minor issues.
Regards
Louis
Sorry for late reply. Not sure why custom header is not showing up in IE8. Check the opacity of the header area. The image should be on top of the background color, but not sure this is always the case in all browsers. Didn’t know options changes don’t always get saved. Any more detail about this issue you can send me would be helpful. The topbar is only visible on posts page… Looks like you set of the home page as a static page, but didn’t specify any page for blog posts…. To see the top bar and RSS feed links, specify a posts page in your Settings > Reading.
Hope this is helpful.
Thanks Alex, I’ll try and get back to you. The Post page will be more visible once I remove the index.html from my old site. I’ll go into some individual posts and put a link here if needed. Not sure I understand the “image should be on top of the background color”, but will try and play to see.
The saving issue is quite interesting. At first it saved quiet fine but as soon as I started the custom header portion it seized all saving. The workaround still works, but it’s annoying and as a developer I understand you want it fixed, so if I can figure more out about it I will let you know.
Thanks again.
-L-
Hi Alex!
Thanks for all you earlier help. I have created a HOME page that I would like to use for a static front page. The instructions I found says to:
* Set the “Home” template to the default template or any custom template.
My question is which file do I edit and do I do this?
Thanks,
Carla
Never mind! In reading the post above mine, I saw that there are setting in “reading” which allows me to set the static page. Thanks!