A mason­ry list view is nicer. The orig­i­nal mason­ry archive from the bs Loop Tem­plates lists the posts in four columns. Four columns with arti­cle open­ings pro­vide a quick, good overview. And yet: with­out a side­bar, this won’t be a real ‘land­ing page’. After all, we want to be able to present the lat­est news to our read­ers ‘on the side’. For­tu­nate­ly, there is a solu­tion: the Mason­ry Archive with 3 columns: […]

After hav­ing exhaust­ed the images issue, it’s time to beau­ti­fy the list of posts. Up to now we only know the form that bootScore’s index.php gen­er­ates: a list of stripes, one for each arti­cle, the respec­tive Fea­tured Image in the left half, and in the right half the first lines of the arti­cle. How bor­ing. But bootScore also offers a nicer way: a mason­ry as a bet­ter look­out: […]

I have already dis­cussed bootScores blurred images. The prob­lem was easy: In coop­er­a­tion with Word­Press, bootScore embeds images of size ‘medi­um’ in the post lists. And that even on large screens, where the browsers have to fill much more space than the images could do by them­selves. Con­se­quent­ly, the browsers upsize the images that are too small — and blur them. Or, put anoth­er way: bootScore offers an excel­lent ‘Respon­sive Design’ when it comes to the texts. When it comes to the images, not (yet). Here, we offer a way towards bootScore with­out blurred Fea­tured Images — with the help of HTML‑5: […]

There were two things I want­ed to see changed in the bootScore theme before ven­tur­ing into the big inter­ven­tions. I was told that improved top­ic clouds and post lists would increase read­abil­i­ty and usabil­i­ty. For­tu­nate­ly, it was easy to get a more fan­cy tag cloud and an improved list of recent posts show­ing the fea­tured images as thumb­nails: […]

To get less blurred fea­tured images, I sug­gest­ed enforc­ing Word­Press to auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate also square bootScore-spe­cif­ic thumb­nails of size 600x600. The bootScore tem­plates index.php and archive.php should request these images via the com­mand get_the_post_thumbnail(null, 'bsTeaser') instead of ask­ing for the medi­um size. This would make it less like­ly that a pic­ture would need to be upsized. […]

No web­site with­out pic­tures or logos! But inte­grat­ing a logo cor­rect­ly is often a tricky task. They have to be vis­i­ble, well-placed, and leave space for the menu. Addi­tion­al­ly, they must not bloat or dis­tort the head­er area. And the way of inte­grat­ing them into the tem­plates should also allow us to use the fav­i­cons for the brows­er tabs etc. This is where the bootScore devel­op­ers took a lot of the work out of our hands! Once our logos rough­ly fit the intend­ed dimen­sions, we essen­tial­ly need to fol­low the bootScore instruc­tions. And by that, we get a logo and the respec­tive fav­i­cons. […]

I love ZEN pre­sen­ta­tions. For that, you need pic­tures. Many pic­tures. Good pic­tures. For­tu­nate­ly, it is tech­ni­cal­ly easy to inte­grate pho­tos from the inter­net into your own site. What is chal­leng­ing, how­ev­er, is get­ting nice pic­tures legal­ly. […]

I don’t buy images. Nev­er. I take my own pic­tures. Or I use free images released under a Cre­ative Com­mons License. Or in the ‘pub­lic domain’. Some image data­bas­es offer their pho­tographs under their own licens­es, equiv­a­lent to the free licens­es, as long as I do not make their images pub­licly avail­able through anoth­er image data­base. I accept that as well. And as open-source licens­es do, too, some ‘pic­ture’ licens­es impose cer­tain duties on me. Thus, I need a pic­ture cred­it page: […]

Avoid­ing dis­tort­ed fea­tured images is pos­si­ble. We have shown that. How­ev­er, our method is not yet opti­mal: if we let Word­Press when upload­ing pic­tures, also crop the medi­um-sized thumb­nails as squares, we give up what is com­mon­ly expect­ed. Maybe oth­er plu­g­ins need the ‘medi­um’ thumb­nails in the orig­i­nal aspect ratio after all. So it would be bet­ter if we left the com­mon thumb­nail for­mats untouched. But we still need larg­er pic­ture squares: […]