This is the second in my series of styles for K2, which, if I have the time, I hope to add upon almost constantly.
~~Headless~~
After messing with an alpha-transparency idea I had for a style a little while, I gave up on it and started messing with header sizes. This gave me an idea for a K2 style which I am reasonably sure has never been attempted: No header at all. The head has been severed, chopped up, rearranged, and compressed to fit in the right-hand sidebar. This theme supports one or two sidebars, but not none, because it’s made to be used in a sidebar (duh). To use an image in the header, crop it to 210×300 pixels, FTP it to K2’s header image folder, and select it in the K2 options. Again, no demo, sorry, but you can get full-size screenshots by clicking those thumbnails. The image in my screenshots is by David Lanham, I probably shouldn’t have used it, but it was the best image I had as an example.
Installation: Just drop “headless.css” in your K2’s “styles” folder
UPDATE (August 1, 2007): Cleaned up the CSS and added style information at the top so that K2 will add the correct footer info. Also fixed little bug in IE that displayed bullets for the menu items.
UPDATE (March 31, 2008): Ok, I updated the style, and it now features partial support for RC4. The reason I say partial is because there were some small problems I couldn’t quite work out, such as strange unexplainable things happening when you resize the browser window. But, the good news is that three columns works, and some basic issues have been ironed out. Problems I couldn’t fix:
- On pages that are short as a result of lack of content, funky things happen to the sidebars
- With three sidebars, the left sidebar seems funny-sized or strangely-postitioned on some browsers, and for some reason I couldn’t change that.
- Resizing the browser window small is a no-no
- Alignment of the columns may not be perfect
I love comments, no matter how harsh! If you use this, I would really like it if you posted a link in the comments so that I can see it in the wild, and others who want/need a demo can have one.
Awesome theme. I just installed a theme on my new blog after searching for almost two days, now I see this, and you make me want to change again. I don’t know what to do!!!! Keep up the great work.
Thanks! My goal now is to make a theme so beautiful that you have no choice but to switch.
Great style, Colin! I will edit it a bit for my needs
but it’s nearly perfect!
Hey Colin, great theme. It looks like a mirrored version of my theme that I’ve been running for the last year or so. Mine is a mess of hacked css though, yours is much cleaner. How easy would it be to flip your sidebar so it’s on the same side as mine?
Dunno, I’ll give it a try.
Colin, this is a great K2 style you posted. I was looking for something that had a twist on the standard K2 style and your style met that requirement. (Plus, using the David Lanham picture was a good choice.)
Thanks for checking out my website and catching the problem. I work on a Mac and have been viewing the site with the Safari browser. Until you mentioned the problem, I had not noticed that the site didn’t work in Firefox. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Here’s what the webpage should look like: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~asoto/tnt_blog_snapshot.pdf
Basically, the right corner is just a 200 x 310 jpg of a purple box with the Team in Training logo in the lower right corner.
Any help would be appreciated.
Great Theme! Thank you!
My pleasure!
Thanks for dropping by my blog. (Didn’t expect u to do that) I really love the unique design of this theme. Thank you for creating and sharing it. =)
No problem! I like seeing what people do with it!
My pleasure, and I’m going to be making more.
Hi Colin, thanks for the style. I am using it on my blog (which you already know cos you stopped by before I could thank you and now I’m embarassed). The look fitted what I wanted and it allows me to show my photos quite nicely in the header.
Thanks again.
Thanks for making such a nice theme, I’m currently using it
@Louise: My pleasure! I actually like to surprise some people by going and finding them.
@Shaun: No problem, and thanks for using it!
Thanks Colin for contributing this great theme! Easy to setup, works flawlessly, and easy to modify…
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoy it!
I give in, how do you find people using your (awesome) style?
WordPress shows pages that link to my site in the dashboard, and all of my styles include a link to me in the footer. Pretty simple mechanism, actually. ^_^
Colin, I really like this style. It was just what I was looking for. Almost every wordpress style seems to have that big splash at the top.
Super work!
Great job!
One little thing for pages w/ very small posts: #primary needs a min-height, like 400, otherwise the sidebar flows to the left.
Awesome Colin. Great work.
A minor issue: when getting a 404 error (bad search results or a normal 404), you would have the sidebar floating to the right of the page right below the 404 error message.
I fixed that by adding the following to the css:
.four04{
margin-bottom: 120px;
}
50px would be enough for the bad search, but about 120 is needed for the normal 404s.
Thanks, I appreciate it! I’ll be updating it for RC3 Compatibility soon, and I’ll throw that in there and fix the other bugs mentioned. ^_^
I really like this style. Good job! I’m looking forward to a fully RC3 compatible version, hope you’ll find the time…
I’m in the middle of a really frantic time, but I hope I have the time soon! D;
gorgeous work. love the clean lines. I’m sporting the default right now. Would it possible to change the background to a pattern? I’ll try playing around with it, but I’m kinda dumb when it comes to CSS editing. thanks for the great theme!
After some evaluation I’d like to use your theme on a new project some friends and me would like to start next week. However, we need a K2 RC3 three column layout (soon!) which currently isn’t supported by your style. I know how to code, but I don’t like php/css and honestly I just suck at web-development.
Unfortunately I can’t offer you anything besides a link and eternal thankfulness - but I’d be more than glad if you somehow could find the time to update your theme. Whenever you improve your theme, please drop me a line.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts!
Love the Theme, I think I ill stick with this one, its as simple as I wanted.
One question though, is there a way to show all of my parent pages in the “header” menu. As of now it will only show 7 of the pages, and I have about 10.
Any help would be great.
@Mikelite: Thank you very much, I appreciate it! And, that should be easy! Find the body or html sections in the style.css, and add “background: url(http://URL.TO/YOUR.IMAGE) repeat;” (minus the quotes, of course)
@Ben: I’ll try to find some time TODAY, since I’m home sick, and haven’t got much on my plate.
@KevBo: You may have to make the header taller, which would require moving around a few things, but it’s not impossible. If you have any CSS knowledge, you should grab Firebug and tweak the CSS until it looks good to you.
Hello. I’m new to k2, I love this style but I’m having trouble getting the three columns like the screen shot above shows. I can get 3 columns with two sidebars on the right but not a sidebar on either side of the posts. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
This is one of the most beautiful — and simple — Wordpress styles I’ve seen around. I’m currently using it for my book review website, and planning to tweak some of the cosmetic details. =)
I’m having similar trouble as Orrin too - the 3-column layout spills off the screen, the left-hand column can’t be seen. I’m using K2 Release Candidate 4, FYI.
Nevertheless, I love this style! Thank you so much for making it! =)
i was having the same problems over at my site, but I just went back to K2 RC3. Here’s the link
Yeah, I really need to upadate this. D:
Colin,
I just installed the new style and everything looks good. It looks like the 3-column works now but I’ve currently grown comfortable with the 2-column so I think I’ll keep using it. I’m also kind of curious how the new Wordpress 2.5 (with the new sidebar manager) works with k2 and how that will all work out because it looks like Wordpress has all of the features that k2 had/has.
Anyway.. thank you for the great style.
The new WordPress doesn’t change the front-end at all, except of course for gallery posts. Until you start messing with things that K2 wasn’t built to handle (And it can handle a lot), you’ll be fine. ^_^
Thanks for this K2 style Colin H.
I suggest you in next version to add some special “class” styles inside, like:
Example: http://cleanjs.com/2007/06/09/cleanjs-wordpress-theme-first-release/
That’s really cool, I’ll work on that next time. ^_^ But, doesn’t K2 have that already? If K2 has it already, this style will have it, too, this style is made from K2’s default style.
Small fix for RC6. Just removed “-moz-border-radius-topleft: 3px; -moz-border-radius-topright: 3px; -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 3px;-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 3px;” (in core.css.php, line 183). This way the nav buttons are not rounded in Firefox and Safari.
About the sidebars jumping to the left if page content is too short… just add some non-breaking spaces -  . I don’t know how valid this is but i don’t care
This is a great style, many thanks Colin!
is there anyway to make this work with RC6? I updated to WP2.5 and only RC6 works right. I can’t imagine switching to another theme! thanks colin, mike