KevinHarder.com

Several moons ago I mentioned that I was working on a new site-wide CS 2007 theme using the incredibly flexible Chameleon theming system. Well I vastly underestimated how long it would take someone as design-challenged as myself to create a site-wide theme, but the good news is that v1 is finally complete and is now live on this site and my family site!

The even better news is that it will soon be available for everyone to try out and freely download on a new CS Themes site that we are putting up. It will showcase all of the great themes that were submitted as part of the Community Server 2007 Theming Extravaganza. Like many of my talented Telligenti co-workers, I stayed up very late the night before the deadline (Aug 1) finishing it up.

I'm planning on writing a couple blog posts about my experiences in building a site-wide Chameleon theme with tips and ideas.  But first here is a brief overview of the theme.

Gulf Coasting is so named because I grew up on the Florida gulf coast and wanted to use beach and gulf inspired colors and images for this theme. It is a fixed-width design that features two header boxes which can be completely customized via the dynamic theming options, and a wide sidebar on the right. This is my favorite format for weblogs and photo galleries, which are the two applications I spent the most time on by far.

File Gallery and the user profile pages look decent in this format as well, but I had a difficult time trying to get all of the Forum pages to fit in the wide-right sidebar format. I liked how the forum group and individual forum pages turned out, but the post and thread views need major re-organizing to really fit and I ran out of time to do that properly.  So I recommend using Gulf Coasting on CS 2007 sites where you are not using forums. at least initially.

I will continue to work on improving the theme and release newer versions in the future. I'm considering making the right sidebar disappear for a few pages where it doesn't really make sense, especially the forum post/view ones.

There are a few features that I particularly like in Gulf Coasting. On the photo gallery image detail page, there is a horizontal photo slider control that is built using the Chameleon scrollable pager.  And on the site home page is a Facebook-inspired Activity List. It contains recent site activities such as new posts/photos/files, new comments/trackbacks, and new members.  I'm working on a more robust version of the Activity List as a free CS-add-on that you can add to any CS 2007 site/theme and will track many more types of events.

I haven't done a great deal of testing in browsers outside of IE & FireFox so far either, so I may need to make some CSS tweaks to make sure it looks decent in Opera/Safari/etc. Please let me know if anything looks funny in your browser (other than pictures of me), or if you have any suggestions. Thanks!

Update 10/11/2007: A newer version of Gulf Coasting has been published for CS 2007.1.