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StudioBlue Version 2 - Take Control!Posted by admin in Theme Changes/Bug Fixes on 10 13th, 2008 | 67 responsesAs you know I am currently renovating and revisiting my old themes in attempt to improve their functionality. My main goal is to greatly enhance the theme options menu, and give my users more control over their blog. With StudioBlue 2.0 you will enjoy a much larger array of theme options that i hope will enhance your blogging experience. Here is a brief overview of what I have added:
1. Blog Color-Scheme-Switcher
From within the theme’s options menu you can now choose between 5 unique color schemes. This is handled through a simple dropdown menu, and you can switch between each color any time you want.
2. Optional Blog-style Post Style
If you don’t like the CMS style font-page, or feel that it simply doesn’t suite your blog’s content/subject matter, you can simply switch to “Blog Style.” This is also done through a simple dropdown menu, and you can change back and forth any time you like.
3. Enhanced Advertisement Management
I have added several new banner options, each of which is handled via the theme’s options menu. Furthermore, each of these banners is optional! You can turn them on and off from the options menu, and you are free to have any combination of banners that you like. The available banner options are:
4 125×125px Banners in the Sidebar
1 250×250 Banner in the Sidebar
1 468×60 Banner on Post Pages
1 728×90 Leaderboard Above the Content
4. Optional Categories Dropdown Menu
I have added a dropdown menu function to the categories navigation bar. This is also optional, and can be turned on and off from within the theme’s options menu.
5. Additional Homepage Settings
You can now choose to enable/disable the various elements on the homepage, including the featured articles section, the categories boxes towards the bottom, and the popular/random articles lists. You can also choose how many featured articles to display, how many recent posts to display, and how many recent posts to display in the category boxes (which are also a new feature themselves).
6. Additional Post-Page Settings
You can now turn off the thumbnails on post pages. In some case the thumbnail acted as preview for an image that was already included in the post, in this case you might not want a thumbnail on the post-page at all. You can also choose to enable/disable the tabbed menu below the post. I have also added to ability to change the comments style from the “graphical” style that is currently active, to a more minimal style without images or gravatars. (I removed the gravatar plugin and am using wordpress’ native gravatar function now)
7. Improved Options Interface
Aside from that I have simply tried to improve the look of the options page itself. It was getting quite cluttered before, and now has a much more organized interface:
There are other options available as well, you’l just have to update and play with them yourself. This is the type of functionality that you can soon expect from all of my themes, especiall all new theme releases. I hope everyone is doing well, stay tuned for more updates!
