A WhiteBox

It has been a while since I started working on Dark Autumn. With the little time I had/have, it seemed to me that It would take me forever to finish it up. So I decided to release it as beta. The design is done from scratch by yours truly and evolved to a habari theme with the help of the constant encouragement by the friends at the Habari community. Thanks guys.

Download

Initial release (latest): version 1.0-beta - Download

Theme Preview

A demo of Dark Autumn is available at demo.awhitebox.com

Known issues

Before I get to the theme features, I should re-emphasis that this is a beta release. This means that there was not much testing done. So, if you find any issues that are not mentioned below, please go forward and report them in the comments area of this post. Help is, as always, welcomed and appreciated.

• Not compatible with Internet explorer 6: So far, I hadn't have the nerve to actually *hack* the CSS for IE6. As much as I would love to leave it at that and say that I am never going to support it, I can't do that. So IE6 lovers, you're still getting a compatible version, just not yet :) I have decided that I will no longer hack for IE6.
• Limited browser testing: I have tested the theme in Firefox2 and 3, on windows and mac, and Safari 3 on Windows. I am willing to test it on more browsers/platforms, but if you do find any bug spesific to your browser or platform, please feel free to report it.
• The "branch" image overlaps with long post titles.
• Pagination is displayed even if there is only one page in the requested set.
• Wrong sidenotes feedlink
• Configuration form does not show in Habari 0.5.x
• Entry comments feed image is not showing up correctly

Compatibility

Dark Autumn was tested with Habari 0.5.x and Habari 0.6-alpha (svn HEAD). The theme will not work with Habari 0.4 due to missing features that the theme relies on.

Features

Some of Dark Autumn's features include:

• Two columns and a "footerbar": In addition to the sidebar, you can add more "plugins output" to the dark footer bar. Future version should have separately configurable footer bars for entry and pages than the one in the homepage or the search results.
• Integrated Sidenotes support (a.k.a Asides): Just like Mzingi, Dark Autumn comes with support for asides. All you need to do is to tag your post with "aside", and that post will be excluded from the main post display and displayed in your sidebar ( The "aside" tag is configurable in the theme settings - See the "Configuration" section for more details).
• Configurable: You can configure the main colors, images, and some of the textual content of Dark Autumn using the theme settings. Refere to the Configuration section for more details on possible customizations.
• Customized plugin support: The theme ships with a customized templates for both of Twitter and Blogroll plugins. It also includes the necessary "calls" for the RN Tagcloud, Maintenance Mode and the Colophon plugins. So the only thing you need to do is to activate these plugins, and they will work. Nothing is needed to be added to your sidebar/footerbar.

Installation

• Extract the downloaded archive in /user/themes/ of your Habari installation.
• For your admin site, open the 'Themes' page and activate Dark Autumn

Configuration

After installing the theme, you will be able to see a "Settings" button. Clicking on that will open up the theme configration form. In there you can configure the following:

• Theme colors: You can change how the theme look like by changing the colors. Configurable colors include banner color, links color, links hover color and background color.
• Images: You can disable any of the built-in silhouette images, and you can also set a background image for the upper banner by proving a full url to the that image.
• Textual: In the Textual section you can set your Asides tag to whatever you want, change the text for the Feed link in the site main navigation, Maintenance mode page page title and also the blurb text that is displayed right below your site title.

Screenshots

Homepage

Single Entry page

Theme configuration

Thanks!

Many thanks to Stefan Petre for writing the free ColorPicker jquery plugin and to IHeartVector for their free vectors.

A big thanks to Matt for his help with the footerbar, Chris and Michael for answering my CSS questions. And a big thanks to the rest of the Habari community for giving away their opinions as well as their encouragements.

License

The Dark Autumn code is licensed under the terms of Apache Software license 2.0. This means that you can freely redistribute and or modify and release the theme. As long as you attribute the author within the "source code".

If you like the theme, I kindly ask you to keep the link backs in the footer. This is not mandatory, however.