Michael Janzen

186 Responses to “WordPress Theme”

1. mark says:

   December 7, 2009 at 6:07 am

   Michael,

   Thanks for the quick and helpful reply.

   I cannot see how do we add an RSS.

   Thanks,

   Mark

   Reply
2. Michael Janzen says:

   December 7, 2009 at 9:48 am

   Hi Mark,

   I suggest using a text widget in the top right of the main sidebar. You can see an example of this at http://www.tinyhousedesign.com

   Reply
3. Mariam Dessaive says:

   January 5, 2010 at 4:04 pm

   Michael,
   thanks for the lovely template and for your help using it. For a peek: http://www.frauenrechte-rheinmain.de
   Kind regards from Frankfurt,
   Mariam

   Reply
4. Vince says:

   January 8, 2010 at 12:31 pm

   Hey Michael,
   Great Theme, but I have been having a hard time putting in the Google Adsense Code. Where is the best place to put this.
   Thanks.

   Reply
   • Michael Janzen says:

     January 8, 2010 at 12:42 pm

     Hi Vince,

     Use the ‘text widget’ and paste your adsense code into it. The main reason I made so many widget regions was to serve up ads and other content effectively. The top of the sidebar is the best spot, at least on my blogs. Look at http://www.tinyhousedesign.com/ for the most optiimized layout.

     The double column ad unit (two vertical ads, 160×600 and 120×600) lower in the sidebar works great! It’s simply a hand coded table with two cells pasted into a text widget.

     Another trick (so to speak) is to put a image only 300×250 above a text only 300×250. Both ad units get similar traffic as long as you don’t have two text only and two image only together. It seems when you mix it up the ads are more likely to avoid ‘ad blindness’ improving their effectiveness.

     Good Luck!

     Reply
5. Vince says:

   January 8, 2010 at 4:37 pm

   Hey Michael,
   I tried pasting the code in the ‘text widget’ but nothing shows up. It just has a big empty space. Any suggestions?
   Vince

   Reply
   • Michael Janzen says:

     January 8, 2010 at 5:28 pm

     The only thing that comes to mind is that adsense is not delivering ads or a caching plugin is turned on. To see if the javascript adsense code is getting saved and displayed view page source and scroll down to the sidebar and have a look.

     Reply
6. Vince says:

   January 15, 2010 at 11:39 am

   Hey Michael,
   I was finally able to drop in the code.

   But, I have one more question: Is there anyway to move the “add comment” from just below the title of the post, to the end of the post.

   Thanks

   Reply
   • Michael Janzen says:

     January 15, 2010 at 11:51 am

     Hi Vince,

     Yes it’s not hard to do. Just go to Appearance > Editor and then select the index.php file on the right.

     Look for this line of code:
     <div><?php comments_popup_link(‘Add a Comment’, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’, ‘commentslink’); ?></div>

     Then move it down to just before where it says:
     </div><!–end the_content–>

     Reply
7. Judi says:

   January 17, 2010 at 12:11 pm

   Hi Michael –

   This is such a great theme — I just love it.

   However, I am having the toughest time getting text to wrap around my images. I’ve tried everything I can think of — but nothing works.

   I wonder if you were ever able to help Sherry with her issue and if so what was the fix?

   Thanks,

   Judi

   Reply
8. Judi says:

   January 17, 2010 at 12:11 pm

   oops — if you’re looking at my blog, the problem is on the About Us page.

   Thanks,

   Reply
9. Michael Janzen says:

   January 17, 2010 at 2:21 pm

   Hi Judi,

   When you insert the image selecting aligh right/left should allow the text to wrap.

   -Michael

   Reply
10. dls says:

    January 18, 2010 at 7:15 pm

    Love the theme but would like to increase the font size of the Title in the header. What do I need to edit?

    Reply
11. dls says:

    January 18, 2010 at 7:19 pm

    Let me rephrase that… I’ve found #header in the css which increases the size of the full title but I would like to get something like

    Title part Atitle part b

    in other words BIG FONT…little font

    thoughts?

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 18, 2010 at 8:11 pm

      Hi DLS,

      If you add some CSS to the ‘Custom CSS’ field on the ‘Edit Basic Simplicity’ page you can change the font size in the header. For example:

      #header h1 { font-size: 20px; }
      #header .description { font-size: 14px; font-weight:bold;}

      To change the color of the text you need to do something slightly different because the blog title is linked:

      #header h1 a { font-size: 20px; color:#000000; }

      Does that make sense?

      Reply
12. Andrew says:

    January 19, 2010 at 5:37 pm

    I like you theme!
    Trying to get it set up with my friend’s business logo for the header…It needs to be wider for it all to fit, seems like that should be an easy fix, right? Any hints? I don’t know that much about CSS.

    Andrew

    Reply
13. Andrew says:

    January 19, 2010 at 6:13 pm

    Well, I managed to get that fixed to some degree, but is there a way to center the img now. I tried putting “center” instead of “left no-repeat” at the header code are but it didn’t seem to work. Thanks for any help!

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 19, 2010 at 7:46 pm

      Try this in the ‘Custom CSS’ field on the ‘Edit Basic Simplicity’ page.

      #header { background: #ffffff url(‘http://angelicasgarden.net/wp-content/themes/basic-simplicity/images/securedownload3.jpg’) center no-repeat; }

      Reply
14. Cathy Miller says:

    January 21, 2010 at 6:25 am

    Hi Michael:

    I love your theme. It’s still a work in progress but I do love it. Question–how can I eliminate the date in each post. I might also want to eliminate the “Posted by.”

    Also, I adjusted the font. I like the result in my 1st 2 posts but the font went really small in my most recent post (the poll). I didn’t change anything between posts so I don’t know why that happened. I tried to adjust but it just wasn’t working.Suggestions Thanks.

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm

      Hi Cathy,

      It looks like you added a style in the wordpress text editor which negated the style in the stylesheet.

      To remove things like the posted by and date you’ll need to edit the template itself. Go to appearance > editor and select index.php on the right. Scroll down to the line:

      Posted < ?php if(is_page()) {}else{ ?>< ?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>< ?php } ?> by < ?php the_author() ?> < ?php if(is_page()) { ?>< ?php }else{ ?>and filed in < ?php the_category(', ') ?>< ?php } ?> < ?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?>

      Then remove the parts you don’t want.

      The date: < ?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>

      The Author: by < ?php the_author() ?>

      If you want to remove both on that line you might also want to remove the word “Posted”

      Reply
15. Shelisa says:

    January 22, 2010 at 11:37 pm

    I am very new to blogging and have no real technical skill. Can you please explain where I would go to to change the header picture. I am so lost! I am only familiar with the upload header themes(easy) Thanks

    Shelisa

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 23, 2010 at 9:28 am

      Using FTP software upload your photo to wp-content/themes/basic-simplicity/images/

      Then enter the name of the file on the Appearance > Edit Basic Simplicity page.

      Reply
16. Cathy Miller says:

    January 23, 2010 at 10:29 am

    Thanks, Michael. I’ll play around with it but I didn’t make a change between the 2nd & the 3rd post so that’s why I don’t get why it suddenly changed font size.

    I did change the HTML for the last post to make the font size bigger on the last post only after it was very small font. I may revert back to your original as I didn’t make a ton of changes. Fingers crossed it works.

    Reply
17. Jane Kirsch says:

    January 24, 2010 at 12:58 pm

    Hi Michael: Thanks so much for this theme – it is just what I was looking for! I am an intermediate level geek in site design and have had some challenges getting it to look like I want but they’ve each been a valuable lesson.

    The one problem that remains is that I can’t find the files for the widget boxes to change the way the content appears in them. If you look at my site, the categories, archives and blogroll are all parked to the left of the sidebar column- can I move them to center somehow?

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 24, 2010 at 2:35 pm

      Hi Jane,

      #sidebar is wrapped around the entire sidebar so any styles applied to it would change the entire sidebar. for example:

      #sidebar {text-align:center;}

      .sidebar-widget is wrapped around each widget. styling this would style each widget and have essentially the same effect. for example:

      .sidebar-widget {text-align:center;}

      If you want the text aligned left but pushed to the left a little more you could try something like:

      .sidebar-widget { width:300px; margin-right:20px;}

      Did that help of confuse things more?

      Reply
18. Brad Moldofsky says:

    January 24, 2010 at 1:20 pm

    I love the simplicity of your website and the nice utility you included to customize certain elements. My wife, however, wants her logo to be taller. Is this an option in your theme or is completely fixed. I understand that it would probably result in some vertical scrolling as a result, but she’s the boss. Thanks, man.

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 24, 2010 at 2:36 pm

      Hi Brad,

      You could add a style in the ‘Custom CSS’ field like:

      #header {height: 140px;}

      Reply
19. andrew says:

    January 24, 2010 at 1:41 pm

    Thanks Michael, but it didn’t work. Now there is no image. That’s weird. Any other advice? Thanks in advance.

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 24, 2010 at 2:50 pm

      That would be a bug I need to fix that.

      I’ll send you the updated file in a little bit (and upload it to wordpress)

      Reply
20. Brad Moldofsky says:

    January 25, 2010 at 6:16 pm

    Hey, that worked. Awesome.
    My favorite thing about the WordPress site is that you built a utility that allows customization. That’s very convenient for people who’d rather blog than code.

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 25, 2010 at 7:38 pm

      Thanks Brad… yeah that was me too! I got tired of editing other people’s themes and decided to go simple and build the ability to quickly customize for each of my blogs. Glad you like it!

      Reply
21. Bruce Seidner says:

    January 26, 2010 at 5:55 pm

    I been using your theme for awhile. Now I am combining my website and blog together using WordPress and want to know how to eliminate the posted date and by author on pages only with your theme? I still want those to show on posts

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 26, 2010 at 6:03 pm

      Hi Bruce,

      I’ll work on the sample code for that but it will require an edit to the index.php page found at Appearance > Editor and then pick index.php

      Also… I just posted a new version of Basic Simplicity. The only two things existing users will need to know is that the header image path is handled differently and if you’ve edited files like the index.php page you’ll need to backup your old copy first so you can go back and make those edits again.

      -Michael

      http://www.basicsimplicity.com/

      Reply
22. Carlos Perez says:

    January 27, 2010 at 12:14 pm

    I downloaded your theme earlier this week and love it! It was exactly what I was looking for. And I see you’ve been very patient and helpful with people’s questions.

    I do have one that may not necessarily be an issue with the theme. Although I’ve changed various colors through your customization utility as well as on the css style sheet, those changes still don’t show up when I reload my pages. I’ve tried this at home and at work, and still the old changes I made yesterday show up although I’ve changed things today.

    Also, I get a different look if I type in the ‘www.’ prefix to the url as opposed to leaving this out. Do you know why this might be?

    And thanks again for your great work!

    -C

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 27, 2010 at 12:26 pm

      Hi Carlos,

      Two things come to mind first. The first is that any edits to style.css (the stylesheet) may get overridden by the data in the form. Basically the form adds styles, a second stylesheet if you will. View source and you’ll see it in the page between the style tags.

      The other thing is a question… are you running WP Super Cache or similar? When style related edits don’t show up it’s usually because you’re looking at a cached (old) page, either in the browser or provided by the server or host. Could this be the case? Different browsers handle caching differently too, for example IE likes to hold onto it’s cached pages harder than say firefox.

      I uploaded a fresh version of the theme too, see http://www.basicsimplicity.com for details on upgrading. It’s still free, just some new features.

      Reply
23. Carlos Perez says:

    January 27, 2010 at 12:57 pm

    Wow, quick reply! Originally, I thought it was a cache issue (and still think it is somehow). However, I’ve gone and cleared out my web history and cache on Firebox, Safari, and Explorer and the same problem exists. Plus, I had my girlfriend check out the site from her computer for the first time and she got the same old site colors even though she wouldn’t have had a cached site.

    I don’t know about WP Super Cache but I will update the newest version of the theme. I’ll probably do more research on the wordpress forums.

    Thanks Michael!

    -C

    Reply
24. 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!

    Reply
25. 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

    Reply
    • 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

      Reply
26. 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

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      January 28, 2010 at 8:08 pm

      Happy to help Judi… and glad it worked!

      Reply
27. 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

    Reply
    • 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

      Reply
28. 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.

    Reply
    • 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

      Reply
29. 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?

    Reply
    • 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.

      Reply
30. 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.

    Reply
    • 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

      Reply
31. 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

    Reply
    • 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

      Reply
32. Judi says:

    February 15, 2010 at 9:55 am

    You are GOOD!

    Thanks for the quick response!

    Judi

    Reply
33. 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.

    Reply
    • 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

      Reply
34. joecmn says:

    March 24, 2010 at 12:47 am

    Thank you Michael for the hardwork that you have put on this theme. Can you tell me how to make the menu like drop down list?
    Regards,
    Joe

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      March 24, 2010 at 9:30 am

      Hi Joe. That is a feature I’ve not planned to add. It requires adding some javascript and css as well as some edits to the html that surrounds the lists wordpress generates at the top. You might look for some plugins that so similar things.

      Reply
35. Mike F says:

    March 25, 2010 at 1:33 pm

    Hi Michael:

    Are you still there?

    I’m new to WordPress and your theme (Basic Simplicity) has been the MOST helpful to me.

    Thanks already.

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      March 25, 2010 at 2:12 pm

      Thanks Mike.

      …and I’m here… did I miss something?

      Reply
36. Mike F says:

    March 25, 2010 at 3:16 pm

    No it’s just that the last post I saw was from Jan.

    A couple of quick questions, though.

    1. If you aren’t already wealthy from having shared all this knowledge, I’d like to get a small donation to you.

    2. Is there a search feature on the Basic Simplicity theme or did I not look thoroughly?

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      March 25, 2010 at 3:23 pm

      Ahh… yeah I should blog on my personal own blog more often. I’ve got several and have been spending more time on specific topics, mostly http://www.tinyhousedesign.com

      Thanks for the donation offer. Instead of money how about a positive vote on the theme at wordpress? http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/basic-simplicity

      For search I just use the built in search widget plus the plugin “Search Everything”. The built-in wordpress search is pretty bad but that plugin seems to fix it all up.

      Reply
37. Mike F says:

    March 26, 2010 at 8:05 am

    Hi Michael:

    I’m still working on my site. Thanks to you, I feel like I’m getting somewhere.

    HOWEVER, I have a question for which you might have an answer:

    I’d like ONE of my pages to look like a blog. That is, I’d like it to have tags underneath the posts.

    If you’d like to check out the site, it’s http://www.precisiontextediting.com

    The page I’d like to look like a blog is the one called “Writing Help.”

    You’ll see that people apparently ARE able to comment, but there are no tags under the first post.

    I might have other questions, and I’m more than willing to pay you for your time!

    Thanks so much.

    Reply
38. Michael Janzen says:

    March 26, 2010 at 9:50 am

    Mike,

    So you want to hide tags etc on most pages. Right now I use a built in WordPress function called is_page() to show and hide things between posts and pages.

    There are more conditional functions you could use to customize your blog. http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

    See the section on Pages called ‘A PAGE Page’ and not the section on posts.

    You’ll find things like:
    is_page()
    When any Page is being displayed.
    is_page(’42′)
    When Page 42 (ID) is being displayed.
    is_page(‘About Me And Joe’)
    When the Page with a post_title of “About Me And Joe” is being displayed.
    is_page(‘about-me’)
    When the Page with a post_name (slug) of “about-me” is being displayed.

    I think you could make a little conditional statement in the index.php file in the theme to show the tags etc for just one page.

    Reply
39. Mike F says:

    March 26, 2010 at 12:36 pm

    Wow.

    Maybe this question might have a simpler answer since the above is pretty complex (by my low standards):

    Is there a way to rename the HOME page to something else (ie, Writing Help)?

    Reply
    • Michael Janzen says:

      March 26, 2010 at 12:45 pm

      Mike… yes that’s an easy one.

      Open Appearance > Editor and then header.php over on the right side of the screen under ‘Theme Files’.

      Find this line:

    • “>< ?php _e("Home"); ?>

    Change it to:

    • “>Writing Help

    Then make your ‘Writing Help’ page a post instead.

    Does that accomplish what you’re trying to do?

    -Michael

    Reply