Column theme

screen grab of the new layout

The new theme for bodmas.org has a four column home page leading to single column article, archive and search result pages. There is still a lot of tweaking to do, but so far I like it. The idea and colours came from a Paolo Nutini CD that Ruth bought home one day – that 1960s look always rings bells with me as I remember looking at the oranges, browns and olives on the wallpaper as a nipper.

Paolo Nutini CD cover

The style sheet is quite simple, and the four column layout is achived using columns that are 24.9% of the page wide, floating to the left. The idea was ‘borrowed’ from Paul Ingram’s Ingram Labs page, itself featured on the One Page Sites blog post from 37 Signals.

Ingram Labs for the four column layout

My four columns start at the left with the About information (as bodmas.org acts as my home page and online CV I suppose). The Recent, the Archives and the Links columns form a time line of sorts. The layout is liquid because then it looks OK on a 1280 px screen but still works (depending on font size) down to 640 px wide.

Archive pages and search results give simple listings of the posts with date, category, or both depending on the type of page. The post pages themselves have wide margins to keep the column width readable.

I’m still working on the colours and some aspects of the css and php for the theme. You can get a text file containing the style sheet, the main template and the comments template if you want it but this is not yet a packaged ‘theme’ for Wordpress. As I use Tinderbox to index pages using lists, I might hack up an export template as well.

Main issues at present

  • How to make the content divs in the columns as long as the column entry other than by the hack of setting height as a large percentage
  • How to make the columns equal in length so the colours reach to the bottom of the page

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