Journalized Winter

Update 7 Dec 2008: This theme is super­seded by Journ­al­ized Theme ver­sion 2.7. Please use that ver­sion from now on.

Update 12 Nov 2008 There is a new Beta ver­sion 2.7 avail­able to try, see the theme page for details. Please down­load it and give it a try.

This ver­sion is now defunct and will no longer be maintained.

On this page you can find the latest ver­sion of my Journ­al­ized Winter WordPress theme.
Click­ing the thumb­nail below will show you a full size screen shot of the theme in action.
screenshot of journalized theme

This release incor­por­ates many of the fixes and changes sug­ges­ted by people try­ing the theme.

You can down­load the files from here: journalized-winter-theme-1.0.2.tar.gz (tar ball for unix or sim­ilar users) or journalized-blue-theme-1.0.2.zip (zip file for Win­dows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a dir­ect­ory called ‘journalized-winter’. Upload the dir­ect­ory and the files within it to your wp-content/themes folder on your server. Login to your blog’s admin­is­tra­tion pages and go to the Present­a­tion page. The new theme should be lis­ted there ready for you to select. If not check the per­mis­sions on your uploaded files.

Enjoy! The theme is licensed under the GPL. So you may modify it and dis­trib­ute it. Please let me know if you use it, modify it, etc. If you have any ques­tions leave a com­ment on this post with your ques­tion. Com­ments are mod­er­ated so you won’t see your com­ment immediately.

What’s Changed?

The main changes in the themes are these:

I’ve added miss­ing tags to the main sec­tion of the theme. That is, the ‘Pre­vi­ous Entries’ and ‘Next Entries’ links after the main con­tent. I’ve also added in the Next and pre­vi­ous story links above the post when you are look­ing at an indi­vidual post.
In the side bar I’ve removed all the get_links() and get_linksbyname() calls and susb­sti­tuted a single call to get_links_list().

I’ve adjus­ted the CSS to dis­play the nes­ted unordered lists from the call to dis­play like the h4/rightsidesection com­bin­a­tion we had before.

I’ve added a page tem­plate for pages like this one with slightly dif­fer­ent lay­out for the con­tent. There are some minor bug fixes on the pages and I’ve added the the fix for aligned or floated images not dis­play­ing in Inter­net Explorer.

129 thoughts on “Journalized Winter”

  1. Pingback: Sodomy Creek » Blog Archive » Bug Fixed

  2. Hey Mike, not long ago I com­men­ted on your Journ­al­ized Sand theme. I just wanted you to know that this week I am not so slack :)
    I am using your “Winter” theme on our home page here

    http://www.observationdeck.org/

    I think it looks fant­astic. Thank you so much. I really am envi­ous of you clever dudes who cre­ate these themes.

    PS. It does look bet­ter in IE than firefox.

    Reply ↓

  3. Hi Patrick,
    The reason your site looks dif­fer­ent in IE is because you’ve added a fair bit of invalid HTML to the page which Fire­fox (cor­rectly) refuses to render. I’m not sure whether you are using a plug-in or have altered the theme files dir­ectly but you’ve got some weird stuff hap­pen­ing on the page.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  4. yeah I’m always doing stuff like that :( I think the main thing is that I have tried to make some of the fonts appear in “old eng­lish” text. Other than that, I think its pretty much un touched.

    Reply ↓

  5. Pingback: Ginger D: Now and Then » Blog Archive » New Layout, and Tweaking Old Entries

  6. Hey mike. What do you use for archives? Do you have an archive.php file, as I found that was the prob­lem, WP couldn’t dis­play any archives because this theme didn’t have that file.

    Altern­at­ively can I con­fig­ure WP to use one of the other PHP files as a sub­sti­tute for archive.php?

    Reply ↓

  7. Hi James,
    WordPress should use the stand­ard index.php for dis­play­ing archives. I cur­rently don’t have a spe­cific tem­plate for them.
    It is some­thing I am con­sid­er­ing for the next release of the themes.

    On this site, I use an old b2 hack from way back for my full archives.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  8. Pingback: Rodrigo López-Negrete » Blog Archive » My first post…

  9. Hey Mike, I’ve redesigned the stylesheet for this theme (made it lighter). Can I release it, and what copy­right inform­a­tion do I need to include?

    Thanks :)

    Reply ↓

  10. Hi James,
    I’m glad you like the theme. I like your col­ours too.

    I think you need to add a quote block top left — I think it looks a little unbalanced.

    You can release it no prob­lem: it’s licensed under the GPL. You need to keep my copy­right notice intact and release your ver­sion under the GPL too. Full details in the license file included with the theme.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

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  17. Hey Mike,

    I recently moved my site over to WordPress and looked at lots of themes to get star­ted with. I liked Journ­al­ized Winter the best, so with that as a start­ing point I did a lot of edit­ing to get my new web­site theme. The color scheme was already pretty close to my old web­site so maybe that’s what attrac­ted my eye.
    Thanks for the work at mak­ing your nice themes public !

    Reply ↓

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  20. Pingback: El Rincón de Boriel » Blog Archive » Finalmente, mi propio tema para WordPressEventually, my own WordPress theme

  21. Pingback: Crabby Night Owl » Blog Archive » A little More Bodywork Needed

  25. Hey, Mike, thanks for the update I’m still new to PHP and CSS, and it would’ve taken me a while to fig­ure out how to fix the “previous/next” issue. Sug­ges­tion for future themes: How about a Journ­al­ized Autumn, Sum­mer and Spring?

    Reply ↓

  26. Hi Matt,
    I can’t see any­thing wrong with your con­tact us page in IE6 on Win­dows 2000. Apart from need­ing to turn off com­ments for that page.
    Have you man­aged to fix it? Or is there a prob­lem with another ver­sion of IE?

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  29. Hi Mike,

    Sorry for all of the ques­tions, but I am really enjoy­ing this par­tic­u­lar theme. Is it pos­sible to change the back­ground to a dif­fer­ent color and if so where do I make the change?

    Reply ↓

  30. Hi Matt,
    The back­ground col­ours for the vari­ous sec­tions of the style, page back­ground, head­ing block, left column and so forth are set in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent places in the CSS file style.css. Look for the word back­ground in the file.
    Was there a par­tic­u­lar col­our you wanted to change? The col­our for the main back­ground page is set on line 15 of the file.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  31. Mike, I used your theme on my site, mod­i­fied a bit. I saw you were using gallery1 and was won­der­ing if you thought about using gallery2? I am attempt­ing to get the wp plu­gin for gal­lery 2 to work with this theme. I want the gal­lery php file to dis­play in the cen­ter. I keep get­ting the error
    [quote]Fatal error: Call to undefined func­tion: get_header() in /xxxx/xxxx/xxxx/xxxxxx/nick.6936.com/wordpress/wp-gallery2.php on line 4[/quote]

    I get this same error when I try to use the http://www.flickr.com plu­gin as well. Any help would be great.

    Reply ↓

  32. Hi Nick,
    I’ve not looked at either of those plu­gins, but it sounds like they are not able to load the stand­ard WordPress include files. I notice that your error mes­sage indic­ates that wp-gallery2.php is in your wordpress dir­ect­ory. Should it per­haps be in wp-content/plugins? Just an idea, I haven’t seen either so I’m guessing.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  33. The install instruc­tions for the plu­gin spe­cificlly state to put the wp-gallery2.php into the wordpress dir. I tried doing just what you ques­tioned, but that didn’t help. The flickr plu­gin php file is installed in the plu­gins dir. I get the same error with it. I am new to php and don’t quite get why the same code works in one place and not another. All I did was replace the middle sec­tion where the post­ing data is with the plu­gin data. Other than those changes the wp-gallery file is the same as index.php. I guess my ques­tion is what does the get_header() line at the top actu­ally do.

    Reply ↓

  35. Well I did get the wp-gallery2.php default to work. I have yet to get it to have the appear­ance of being in the cen­ter­b­lock of your theme. I have some friends that know php a little bet­ter com­ing to visit, so maybe they can help me. I will keep you informed of how it works out. I really like gallery2.

    Reply ↓

  36. Pingback: Truman Arrow Head Will Not Be Silent » Blog Archive » Journalized Winter :: Mike Little’s Journalized

  39. Hi Robin,
    I pre­sume you mean the cal­en­dar? If so, you need to modify the css rule for
    table#wp-calendar
    to change the back­ground colour.

    Any more ques­tions, just ask

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  40. There are sev­eral parts on my blog that are still blue but now I can find the cal­en­dar part. I just need to work thru the CSS piece by piece really. I plan to change the col­ors from time to time…boy it’s work.

    Reply ↓

  41. Pingback: Severe Engineer » Blog Archive » Hello world!

  42. Hey Mike –

    Just wanted to let you know that I think this is the best WordPress theme out there, and it suited my needs per­fectly. Also, thanks for the IE image fix, it was frus­trat­ing try­ing to fig­ure out how to get that to work. I am using 1.0.0 (files) and 1.0.2 (stylesheet) on my site now. Let me know what you think! Thanks again for all the time you put into this template!

    – Mar­tin

    Reply ↓

  44. Love the design! I’ve mod­i­fied it for our guild’s homepage, but the lay­out and col­ors were just what I was look­ing for!

    Also wanted to point out one thing I found. Since story titles were always links, the h3 style was being over-ridden by the link styles and thus were always set to 11px instead of 14/16px. I fixed this by simply unlink­ing the titles. Theres still a [link] but­ton in the bot­tom corner anyway.

    Thanks for the great design!!

    Reply ↓

  45. Hi Fata,
    Yes, I had real­ised that the anchor rule had pre­ced­ence. The next ver­sion of the theme will fix the issue, but I like the con­ven­tion of hav­ing the post title as link.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  46. Pingback: Severe Engineer » Blog Archive » Hello world!

  47. Hi Mike,

    Thanks so much for these ter­rific themes. I’ve put them to good use on a few pages includ­ing the home page for completerunning.com. The tem­plate is ter­rific and is also a great place to start in design­ing one’s own 3-column theme.

    Many thanks,
    Mark

    Reply ↓

  50. Hi Bar­tender,
    You have moved the com­ments link out­side the centreb­lock div. That’s why it’s too far right.

    The centre column should over­lap the right. Have you changed the CSS other than the colours?

    Reply ↓

  51. Thanks mike for the quick reply.
    Yes, I have made some major changes to the CSS, mostly to fix column align­ment issues in when view in Fire­fox.
    Which tem­plate file do I need to alter, the com­ments or index or page?

    Reply ↓

  52. Bar­tender, you need to edit index.php to fix the com­ments link prob­lem. Move the whole “comments_popup_link” sec­tion back inside the centreb­lock div.

    As for the CSS, it is a com­bin­a­tion of the position:relative and z-index set­tings which con­trols which sec­tion over­lays which when the browser is too nar­row. Check out the ori­ginal down­load if you don’t have a backup to put those set­tings back.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  56. Hey Mike
    Love this tem­plate, but I have a prob­lem in IE, as soon as you type even one let­ter in the com­ments box, the box extends off to the right, and the text isn’t wrap­ping. I have never changed the com­ment codes, so I don’t know why this happens.

    HELP!

    Reply ↓

  57. Hi Joe,
    You need to change the code in the comments.php tem­plate.
    Change the style set­ting of the tex­tarea tag to be “width:38em“
    You can also set cols=“65” on that same tag.

    Reply ↓

  58. Pingback: Blogging My Pursuit » 5 Great Three Column Wordpress Themes

  60. Hi Diane,
    I’m glad you like it. I’m quite close to releas­ing a new ver­sion of my themes with some large changes. I hope to be able to do a beta release this com­ing weekend.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  61. Thank you for mak­ing journ­al­ized winter avail­able to the pub­lic. I am new to css and don’t really know my way around the code and was won­der­ing if you could please assist me. I am try­ing to assign a class primar­ily to change the font attrib­utes for the cen­ter story content.

    *p {
    font: 11px/13px verd­ana, arial, hel­vetica, sans-serif;
    mar­gin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
    pad­ding: 2px;
    }*

    this will con­trol the change I desire, but it also changes the attrib­utes in the left and right top column boxes.

    The new class I made works fine in other areas, but I still can’t fig­ure out how to imple­ment this in the tem­plate code spe­cific­ally for the “story con­tent.” I’m assum­ing it has some­thing to do with php the_content in index.php, but I still haven’t figured it out.

    Thank you for any help and your time as well.

    Reply ↓

  62. Hi Krones,
    you need to spe­cify

    .centreblock p {
    font: 11px/13px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
    etc...

    This will limit the style to para­graphs within ele­ments of class centreb­lock, i.e. the blog posts.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  64. Pingback: depsgen.com » Blog Archive » Post # 1

  65. Mike:
    I am cur­rently using this great theme on my web­site. How­ever, I noticed that in IE it looks bad. I do have quite a few plug-ins, but wasnt sure if that effects the over­all look.

    I noticed your site looks OK in IE. Did you do some­thing , or is the prob­lem some­thing I inad­vert­ently did?

    Reply ↓

  67. Pingback: This is my curse…this is my destiny. » Blog Archive » New Theme Added

  69. Hi Mike !
    I’m using Journ­al­ized Winter on my web­site and was able to install all the plug-ins and changes I want :) But there is one thing whereby I need help. I really want a small bor­der around each com­ment so they are more sep­ar­ated. What class must I change/add in the css file ? I’ve tried some things but noth­ing changed ;)
    Thanks in advance , Marion

    Reply ↓

  70. Car­o­lyn,
    In index.php find the part where I out­put the permalink (round about line 28) and add the fol­low­ing:

    [<a href="<?php trackback_url() ?>" title="The URI to TrackBack this entry">TB</a>]

    That should do the trick.

    You might also want to keep an eye on the the new ver­sion of this theme cur­rently in beta. There are a lot of improvements.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  71. Hi Marion,
    try adding the fol­low­ing to the bot­tom of style.css

    ol.commentlist li {
    border: 1px solid #000;
    margin-bottom: 4px;
    padding: 5px;
    }

    Hope this helps,
    Mike

    Reply ↓

  73. Pingback: LOLO punto ES » Blog Archive » Cambiando de tema…

  74. I’ve been modi­fy­ing your 1.00 ver­sion at http://www.idahofallz.com, you may take a look at doing a ver­sion of it. You can see it’s cleaner than your other ones, and uses Arial as the default (so it’s web 2.0 trendy whether you’re into that or not).

    I have been extremely happy with your theme, and fore­see using it for a long time. I moved your blurb giv­ing you props to the bot­tom of the middle sec­tion, but I always for­got to let you know I was using it.

    Now I wish I had earlier, because some of the changes you’ve made in 1.0.2 are some I’ve been pulling my hair out on for sev­eral months now. Ahh, just part of web development.

    Can you sum­mar­ize how/where to make the changes from 1.00 to 1.0.2 before I have to ana­lyze all the code? A quick email would be great sum­mar­iz­ing where to do the spe­cific changes.

    Espe­cially (in order of import­ance to me):

    the fix for aligned or floated images not dis­play­ing in Inter­net Explorer

    minor bug fixes on the pages

    add miss­ing tags to the main sec­tion of the theme (‘Pre­vi­ous Entries’ and ‘Next Entries’ links after the main content)

    add in the Next and pre­vi­ous story links above the post when you are look­ing at an indi­vidual post

    remove all the get_links() and get_linksbyname() calls in the side­bar and susb­sti­tute a single call to get_links_list().

    adjust CSS to dis­play the nes­ted unordered lists from the call to dis­play like the h4/rightsidesection combination

    add a page tem­plate for pages like this one with slightly dif­fer­ent lay­out for the content

    Reply ↓

  75. btw, I’m not try­ing to be lazy by not just installing your 1.0.2 ver­sion. It’s just that we’ve made sev­eral cus­tom­iz­a­tions that we’d be afraid to lose.

    Reply ↓

  76. to answer part of my own ques­tion, I found the the fix for aligned or floated images not dis­play­ing in Inter­net Explorer:

    /* this fixes an IE bug with aligned or floated images */
    .story­Con­tent img {
    position:relative;
    }

    onto the rest…

    Reply ↓

  77. Hi Zeth,
    Do you know how to read diff files? Either tra­di­tional diff or uni­ver­sal format? If so I can provide a diff file.

    You can also read through the com­ments in this post, and the com­ments for the other col­our themes: Sand and Blue too.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  78. No, I’ve never read them. I searched on it, and like the name sug­gests they spot­light the dif­fer­ence. It seemed they are cre­ated by run­ning a linux program?

    This diff file simply high­lights the dif­fer­ences between the each of the 1.00 and 1.0.2 files, right?

    I could try if you have them handy to email; I would appre­ci­ate it and it would save me some time of ana­lyz­ing by eye the differences.

    thanks

    Reply ↓

  79. Mike,

    I really like the struc­ture of your “journalized-winter” theme and am con­tem­plat­ing using it for my blog. Just a quick ques­tion (that I prob­ably already know the answer to), any chance this has been or can be por­ted to cus­tom­ize the look of Gal­lery 2?

    Thanks again!

    Mike I.

    Reply ↓

  81. I’d just use the left side­bar for nav­ig­a­tion and other assor­ted tid­bits. The cen­ter and right would be used for the pic­ture albums and pic­ture presentation.

    Unfor­tu­nately, the instuc­tions for Gallery2 are lack­ing, so without a firm under­stand­ing of CSS or their nam­ing con­ven­tions it’s nearly impossible to cre­ate a theme (you’ll notice there aren’t too many user themes out there!)

    Mike I.

    Reply ↓

  82. Holy crash! My site has been buggy and error­ing and crash­ing the last couple days. Once I was finally able to get in, and my theme had been changed back to default from journ­al­ized with a mes­sage say­ing ‘your theme is broken’ !!!

    I thought, no way, it’s gotta be my host server or db errors, changed it back to journ­al­ized, struggled through the same buggy errors all day until the theme was changed back again.

    I left it on default, and it’s work­ing fine now. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but it looks like i’ve gotta aban­don the journ­al­ized theme, which does bum me out. I just upgraded to wp 2.0.2 a couple nights ago, any­one else have any prob­lems since then or like what i describe?

    i wrote up a sup­port post earlier that describes more of the symp­toms: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/66419?replies=1#post-351711

    Reply ↓

  83. Hi Zeth,
    If you have chan­ging symp­toms, that is, if dif­fer­ent things keep going wrong, then it can­not be your theme. The theme files are not chan­ging in any­way. There are over 300 people suc­cess­fully using my Journ­al­ized themes I think I’d have heard before is some­thing as drastic as this was wrong.

    It sounds like it could be your files have got cor­rup­ted. Have you tried re-installing the theme (make sure you down­load from this site)?

    If there is any invest­ig­a­tion I can do to help you let me know.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  84. Hey again,

    You know that’s what I thought, that’s what every­one I talk to agrees on. Unfor­tu­nately it was just clear when I set it back on the jw theme it went crazy and every other theme there’s no problems.

    I cer­tainly do not mean to diss your work, either! In fact I think I will try rein­stalling and offer both themes for my users via the theme switcher.

    I’ll let you know.

    Reply ↓

  85. Hi Zeth,
    I see in your second com­ment on your sup­port log, that you say you may have been edit­ing the theme at the time.
    Note, that if WordPress says a theme is broken, that is because either it can­not find or access syle.css or if any of the theme files are unread­able, or if it can­not find index.php
    So one of those things must have happened at some point. But prior to that, they must have been OK, other wise you would never have been able to install and select it.

    If you want help with try­ing it again, let me know. I’m will­ing to help.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  86. we switched back to journ­al­ized winter, copied the old code to local desktop, com­pletely deleted all old jw files, reup­loaded the most recent ver­sion, and so far so good. thanks for the prompt sup­port. any­one con­sid­er­ing this theme, it’s awe­some, very ver­sat­ile, and Mike is great with help­ful advice.

    Reply ↓

  89. Hi Mike. I have been using Journ­al­ized Winter for about a month now, and I have run into a prob­lem. First, let me say I’m an idiot when it comes to code. For some reason (prob­ably my fault) the com­ments box, in IE, jumps out past the bor­der when it’s typed in. It doesn’t do it in Fire­fox. Any ideas of what I did wrong?

    Reply ↓

  96. Hi Mike

    I was won­der­ing if there is a theme /layout suit­able for track­ing a Hous­ing pri­oject ie ‚meetings,discussions,lies,email,events,fault logs etc?

    Regards David

    Ps
    I have a choice of using Greatestjournal.com,Wordpress or Phpbb for this. Any ideas?

    Reply ↓

  97. Hi David,
    I can’t think of a spe­cific one that I know that would auto­mat­ic­ally track those kind of things. You will need more than just a dif­fer­ent them or lay­out. You need dif­fer­ent areas of func­tion­al­ity. I’m sure WordPress could
    I d be made to sup­port all those things with a few plu­gins and some cus­tom code to tie it all together, and yes, a theme to help that long.

    I don’t know Greatest­Journal, but I don’t think phpBB would be suit­able. You might even con­sider some­thing like Drupal, but again, that would require adding mod­ules and tail­or­ing it to suit.

    Hope this helps,
    Mike

    Reply ↓

  98. Mike,

    Hav­ing a weird prob­lem. I am using your Journ­al­ized Winter theme with some modi­fic­a­tions. When I view July and earlier posts, all is fine. But when it switched over to August, some of the fonts changed. They are fine when view­ing old posts, but the fonts change when view­ing August posts. Any ideas? infosecplace.com/blog

    Reply ↓

  99. Hi Michael,
    You prob­lem is that the art­icle entitle Mouse Story has an unclosed font tag at the end of it.

    <font color="#000000" face="Georgia" size="3">

    Remove that and everything should be OK again.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

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