Typograph Theme Update – Now With Threaded Comments

Jan. 13, 2009
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typograph-newThe Typograph theme has proven to be incredibly popular and I have gotten tons of emails and comments about it with suggestions of improvements and updates. As an answer to all the input I have uploaded the 0.8.5 version of the theme to the WordPress Theme Directory where you can download it to spiff up your blog even more.

Fixing the tabbed box

One of the major issues with the original Typograph theme was an unexpected one for me: It turned out that the tabbed box was conflicting with a number of popular plug-ins including Lightbox 2 and others. When these plug-ins were installed one of two things would happen: either the plug-in wouldn’t work  or the tabbed box wouldn’t work.

After much discussion both in the original post on this blog and also in the support forums on WordPress.org it became clear that the problem was caused by two separate JavaScript conflicts: First off, the NicEdit HTML editor I used for the comments section was clashing with ceartain plug-ins. Seccondly the JQuery library used to create the tabbed box effect was impinging on other JQuery based plug-ins.

To solve this I’ve done two things: The NicEdit HTML editor for the comments is gone (so no more fancy HTML editing for now, sorry. I’m looking for a solution) and I have rebuilt the tabbed box from scratch using the MooTools library instead. Extensive testing with numerous plug-ins shows that at least as far as I know the conflicts are no longer there and everything works properly. If you do find any more conflicts, please tell me so I can fix them.

Threaded Comments

Typograph threaded commentsOne of the really cool new features in WordPress 2.7 is threaded comments. Basically this means that when you comment on a posting you can answer other comments and your answer will appear “nested” within the comment you answered rather than on the bottom of the page. This is a very cool feature that you had to use a plug-in for in the past. Upgrading to threaded comments was quite a challenge. There is very little information about it around and it took me a while to figure it out. Luckily I came across two blogs with instructions and it is these two approaches combined that formed the basis for the threaded comments in Typograph. These were Chris Harrison’s blog (for styling) and Otto’s blog for backend code. Thanks go out to the both of them for excellent tutorials and to Otto for some extra help via e-mail.

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Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a web designer, developer and educator specializing in WordPress and Expression Web. He has published three books and two video series on web design with more coming, he runs a boutique style digital media company called Pink & Yellow Media and he spends a lot of his time thinking about and sharing his knowledge of the internet, information philosophy and web design and development.
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  • http://one4v.com/ Mena

    Hi,
    If you remember me I’m still using the theme.. here the link http://www.one4v.com/ar..Is there a way to update the theme without removing the theme and uploading it again or overwriting it ..because i have translated it and changing many colors..

    Thanks,
    Mena

  • http://www.pinkandyellow.com Morten Rand-Hendriksen

    Hi Mena

    The major upgrades on the theme have to do with threaded comments and the drop-down menu. If you didn’t make any changes to the template files but only to the CSS the transition shouldn’t be too hard:

    open the old and new tabbedbox.php files and move the content from the different tabs to the new one.
    open the old and new styles.css files and move each style over from the old one to the new one. that way you’ll catch any major changes (I can’t remember but I don’t think there are any) and retain the new styling for the threaded comments.
    do the same for any other files you have messed around with such as the sidebar.php file.

    Once all this has been done you should be able to upgrade your theme without too much of a hassle.

    If you are concerned about losing styling elements, rename the folder for the theme upgrade to something like “TypographNew” so you can switch between them. That way you won’t overwrite any styling or other element you missed the first time around.

  • http://one4v.com Mena

    Hi Morten,
    Thank you, I have updated it and it’s working fine..:)

    Do you know a visual CSS Editor ? or a better editor for template files than Notepad++.. i like it but maybe there is a better one.

  • http://one4v.com Mena

    One More thing, the reply link in comments isn’t there to start a new threaded comment..is there a certain PHP file i have to look for in WP 2.7 to see if it’s there for this feature to work ?

  • http://one4v.com Mena

    Sorry Morten, I didn’t enable it from the Discussion Panel :D .. now it’s working.

  • http://www.pinkandyellow.com Morten Rand-Hendriksen

    Yes, that’s a good tip for everyone: To activate threaded comments you have to go to the Discussion tab under Settings in the admin panel and turn on nested (threaded) comments. Otherwise the new script works just like the old script.

  • Jamiel Sharief

    Well done, the Typograph theme is brilliant.

    Although I have found a potential issue, if you enable “Users must be registered and logged in to comment ” in the settings/discussion this causes for the main control center to appear at the bottom of the page, when there are no users logged in.

    So after changing this setting, please log out of the admin panel and then try to read a posting. Currently using the latest wordpress.

  • http://www.designisphilosophy.com Morten

    Jamiel: I wasn’t aware of that problem but that is definitely not supposed to happen. I’ll look into it first thing next week and see if I can figure out what’s going on.

  • http://one4v.com/ar Mena

    Hi,
    When i put the More Break between words in posts the main control center appear in the bottom…

    Also if a link in a post is long it goes on the main control center

  • http://one4v.com/ar Mena

    This happened in one post when i put the More break… i don’t know why , the post contain only a picture and words ..

  • http://www.m-dnovember.com M-D November

    Love Typograph, been using it for about 6 months, but it looks like the WordPress 2.8 update broke something in the theme. After I upgraded, I kept getting this error when I tried to log into the WP Admin dashboard:

    Fatal error: Cannot redeclare body_class() (previously declared in /home/.equity/MYUSERNAME/MYDOMAIN.com/wp-includes/post-template.php:355) in /home/.equity/MYUSERNAME/MYDOMAIN.com/wp-content/themes/typograph/functions.php on line 10

    Any idea if/when there’ll be a fix for this – or if anyone else is getting this error?

  • http://cdlstudios.com Christopher

    I run into the same problem. has there been a fix or update for this?

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dysa_lGyy7E bink

    Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.

  • Jyoti Padya

    This happened in one post when i put the More break… i don’t know why , the post contain only a picture and words