Michael Janzen

WordPress Theme

Posted May 28th, 2009 by Michael Janzen

Note: I’ve setup a new blog just for my theme, Basic Simplicity. I’ll also be blogging about blogging over there.

118 Responses to “WordPress Theme”

Allan Jackson says:

January 27, 2010 at 1:21 pm

Hi Michael. I’m fairly new to Wordpress but have been fiddling quite extensively. Your theme is one of the the nicest and most customisable of the many free ones I’ve looked at. Thank you for putting it out there for us.

Improvments that I might suggest (I don’t know if its even possible) would be the facility to change the sidebar and post area background colours, and add a bit of space between the sidebar and the content.

Thanks again!
Judi says:

January 27, 2010 at 4:09 pm

Hey Micheal –

I must say your customer service is BEYOND GREAT!! You answer everyone so promptly — truly amazing in this day and age.

Like everyone else, I love the site. I’m trying to get my RSS to show more than 10 posts. So I went in to the widget and changed the number to 20, but it stays at 10.

Is there some way I can fix that?

Thanks,

Judi
Michael Janzen says:

January 27, 2010 at 4:23 pm

Hi Judy,

Thanks! Yeah I try to respond to all comments/emails. Good blogging practice

I think that’s the WordPress part and not the theme. It should be controlled at Settings > Reading. I’ll take a look though, but I don’t think anything I coded would force a limit to the RSS feed.

-Michael
Judi says:

January 28, 2010 at 5:12 pm

Hey Michael –

You were right! I needed to change the WP part — once I got the two in sync — voila! Twenty posts. Yea!

Thanks a lot!

Judi
Michael Janzen says:

January 28, 2010 at 8:08 pm

Happy to help Judi… and glad it worked!
Judith says:

January 31, 2010 at 9:08 am

Hi Michael,
I love your web site, the nice clean lines and simple use.

My problem is I really don’t know what I’m doing and how I got as far as I did with it, becuase I’m a novice at this. Can you tell me how to get back into the header and remove or change the generic words: Just another WordPress weblog

Thanks so much.Judith
Michael Janzen says:

January 31, 2010 at 9:19 am

Thanks Judith,

The header text is in Settings > General on the left lower side of the admin pages.

-Michael
Brad Moldofsky says:

February 1, 2010 at 12:39 pm

Mike,

We’d like to have the “Add a Comment” appear on some pages but not others. We’ve shut off the “Allow Comments” checkbox on some of the pages, but the “Add a Comment” remains but doesn’t do anything. Any easy way to remove it from the screen on some pages but not others? Thanks.

Brad M.
Michael Janzen says:

February 1, 2010 at 2:38 pm

Hi Brad,

The link “Add a Comment” should actually say “Comments off” when the comments are turned off for that page or post. Does it still say “Add a Comment”?

The message “Comments off” is built into wordpress but there is a way to edit the index.php file (Appearance > Editor, select index.php on the right). Begin by opening that index file in the wordpress editor.

Then look for this line of code

<div class="meta-addcomment"><?php comments_popup_link(‘Add a Comment’, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’, ‘commentslink’); ?></div>

and replace it with this:

<?php if ( comments_open() ) : ?>
<div class="meta-addcomment"><?php comments_popup_link(‘Add a Comment’, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’, ‘commentslink’); ?></div>
<?php else : // comments are closed ?>
<!– nothing –>
<?php endif; ?>

Keep a fresh unzipped copy of Basic Simplicity handy (or a backup of the index.php file) in case something breaks. Nothing should break but anytime you mess with the php tags in the templates you run the risk of breaking the theme.

I hope that helps!

-Michael
Dev says:

February 6, 2010 at 1:14 am

Hi Michael. I am also a fan of your Basic Simplicity theme. I just started to use it and decided to keep it. I can’t tell you how many themes I have tried and discarded.

I’m still new to Wordpress themes and working with CSS.

Question about the footer: I added my name after the . It appears on the blog, but now the footer.php code in ‘edit themes’ has disappeared. The box is blank, and the update file button has disappeared. Any reason for this?
Michael Janzen says:

February 6, 2010 at 8:46 am

Hi Dev,

I have no idea why that would happened. I can see the footer on your site, so the footer.php must have code in it. Not sure why it’s not showing up in the editor.
Brad Moldofsky says:

February 12, 2010 at 5:09 pm

Michael,

I know how to make a page the static front page or the page that has all the posts, but is it possible to have the front page contain all the posts AND have some static HTML above it? Specifically, we want to have a self-running slideshow appear above the newest post, and as each new post is created, that one becomes the top post. No doubt I can find a plug-in that’ll give me the slide show, but is it possible to create a front page that combines static and dynamic elements? Thanks, man. Keep up the good work.
Michael Janzen says:

February 12, 2010 at 8:41 pm

Hi Brad,

If you find a plugin like that with a widget you’ll be able to drag the widget into the Home-Top space (Appearance > Widgets).

Then below it you’ll have you regular posts. You can see an example of this (using the tags widget) on http://mikejanzen.com

-Michael
Judi says:

February 14, 2010 at 5:26 pm

Hi Mike –

I love this theme. It is perfect for what I am doing.

But one thing I noticed and it’s freaking me out is when someone posts a comment that I accept, the comment shows on the site with their name – followed by date, time and (Edit). If you click on Edit, you get returned to my WP-Admin site to Edit the comment! OMG – so scary! I want to take the date off and I definitely want to get the EDIT capability off.

I’ve searched your code and cannot find it. Do you know if WP has something I can change?

Thanks so much!

Judi
Michael Janzen says:

February 14, 2010 at 6:02 pm

Hi Judi,

The “Edit” link only shows to Admin’s when they are logged in. Visitors to the site do not see that link.

The date and name can be hidden by adding a style to the Custom CSS field (Appearance > Edit Basic Simplicity)

.comment-author {visibility: hidden;}

-Michael
Judi says:

February 15, 2010 at 9:55 am

You are GOOD!

Thanks for the quick response!

Judi
Dev says:

March 5, 2010 at 1:21 am

Hi Michael. The footer code “disappearance” seemed to resolve itself. I was away from the site for more than a week, and when I logged in to make an update, the footer code was back. Thank you for checking for me. I can’t tell you how many people love the site. I appreciate all the work that you have done on this wordpress theme.
Michael Janzen says:

March 5, 2010 at 10:37 am

Thanks Dev.

It looks like you are running the Google Analytics plugin from Yoast so you don’t need to add your Google Analytics code to the field on the Edit Basic Simplicity page (Appearance > Edit Basic Simplicity). I suspect that may be messing it up because the Google Analytics code is in the page twice.

When adding Google Analytics code to the Edit Basic Simplicity page be sure to use the full javascript code Google provides. But you probably know that… just wanted to add since it may help others.

-Michael

-Michael