Cloistered Theme

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Mina

Our newest theme works either as a stand-alone or a framework and is HEAVILY based on the new WordPress default theme Twenty Ten by the WordPress Team. I’m using it as a great base for the child themes The Cloisters will be implementing.

This theme is two-columns, fixed-width, custom-header, custom-background, threaded-comments, sticky-post, microformats. Featuring a Full-Width No Sidebars page template. There is an options page for setting the background color and header image. It comes with 9 custom header images (all photos were taken by me!) to choose from or you can upload your own and the footer has 4 widgetized sections for more content. Tested in Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8. It is HTML 5 Transitional and CSS 2.1 valid out of the box.

Right now it’s currently only compatible with WordPress 3.0 and I’m not sure when or if it will be made backwards compatible.

The next step will be publishing child themes to go along with this…stay tuned!

Cloisters Framework (5485)
Demo Coming Soon

Posted in Cloistered Framework

3.0 and the future of The Cloisters

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Mina

So the site is now running on the new WordPress 3.0 and a new look. I’ve got a new theme just about ready to be released and with it we’re moving in a new direction. The new theme is based on WP’s new default theme Twenty Ten and will serve as a framework for child themes. You can see it in action here with a child theme made specifically for The Cloisters. I feel moving to child themes will give me and you guys more options and flexibility.

Anyway, stay tuned in the next few days to learn more about it!

Posted in Site News

Upgrading WordPress

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Mina

With yesterday’s release of WordPress 3.0 I wanted to talk about upgrading. I can only really tell you what I do for upgrades and what you choose to do is up to you. I personally install all my blogs in subdirectories mainly because it makes upgrading easier for me.

Now normally for small upgrades that are usually just security fixes I’ll do the automatic upgrade (after ALWAYS backing up) that is part of WP, but when it comes to major version changes (1.x to 2.x and now 2.9.2 to 3.0) or when there are new functions added I’ll do a clean install just to kind of start new. This is where the subdirectories come in handy. I can get the new blog up and running and testing out themes and plugins to make sure everything is working as it should be without any downtime. Install the new blog, import my backup to get all my content in place, activate my themes and plugins and put it through it’s paces until I’m satisfied that all is well. Then simply make the new blog live and you’re good to go!

There is a great article on basic security for setting up your blog from Weblog Tools Collection that I recommend everyone read.

So that is my suggestion, mainly to folks who are new to WordPress so they can maybe avoid a disaster.

Posted in Site News