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Typograph Theme Update – Now With Threaded Comments

typograph-newThe Typograph theme has proven to be incredibly popular and I have gotten tons of emails and comments about it with suggestions of improvements and updates. As an answer to all the input I have uploaded the 0.8.5 version of the theme to the WordPress Theme Directory where you can download it to spiff up your blog even more.

Fixing the tabbed box

One of the major issues with the original Typograph theme was an unexpected one for me: It turned out that the tabbed box was conflicting with a number of popular plug-ins including Lightbox 2 and others. When these plug-ins were installed one of two things would happen: either the plug-in wouldn’t work or the tabbed box wouldn’t work.

After much discussion both in the original post on this blog and also in the support forums on WordPress.org it became clear that the problem was caused by two separate JavaScript conflicts: First off, the NicEdit HTML editor I used for the comments section was clashing with ceartain plug-ins. Seccondly the JQuery library used to create the tabbed box effect was impinging on other JQuery based plug-ins.

To solve this I’ve done two things: The NicEdit HTML editor for the comments is gone (so no more fancy HTML editing for now, sorry. I’m looking for a solution) and I have rebuilt the tabbed box from scratch using the MooTools library instead. Extensive testing with numerous plug-ins shows that at least as far as I know the conflicts are no longer there and everything works properly. If you do find any more conflicts, please tell me so I can fix them.

Threaded Comments

Typograph threaded commentsOne of the really cool new features in WordPress 2.7 is threaded comments. Basically this means that when you comment on a posting you can answer other comments and your answer will appear “nested” within the comment you answered rather than on the bottom of the page. This is a very cool feature that you had to use a plug-in for in the past. Upgrading to threaded comments was quite a challenge. There is very little information about it around and it took me a while to figure it out. Luckily I came across two blogs with instructions and it is these two approaches combined that formed the basis for the threaded comments in Typograph. These were Chris Harrison’s blog (for styling) and Otto’s blog for backend code. Thanks go out to the both of them for excellent tutorials and to Otto for some extra help via e-mail.

By Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at LinkedIn Learning and lynda.com specializing in WordPress and web design and development and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is a popular speaker and educator on all things design, web standards and open source. As the owner and Web Head at Pink & Yellow Media, a boutique style digital media company in Burnaby, BC, Canada, he has created WordPress-based web solutions for multi-national companies, political parties, banks, and small businesses and bloggers alike. He also contributes to the local WordPress community by organizing Meetups and WordCamps.

14 replies on “Typograph Theme Update – Now With Threaded Comments”

Hi Mena

The major upgrades on the theme have to do with threaded comments and the drop-down menu. If you didn’t make any changes to the template files but only to the CSS the transition shouldn’t be too hard:

open the old and new tabbedbox.php files and move the content from the different tabs to the new one.
open the old and new styles.css files and move each style over from the old one to the new one. that way you’ll catch any major changes (I can’t remember but I don’t think there are any) and retain the new styling for the threaded comments.
do the same for any other files you have messed around with such as the sidebar.php file.

Once all this has been done you should be able to upgrade your theme without too much of a hassle.

If you are concerned about losing styling elements, rename the folder for the theme upgrade to something like “TypographNew” so you can switch between them. That way you won’t overwrite any styling or other element you missed the first time around.

Hi Morten,
Thank you, I have updated it and it’s working fine..:)

Do you know a visual CSS Editor ? or a better editor for template files than Notepad++.. i like it but maybe there is a better one.

One More thing, the reply link in comments isn’t there to start a new threaded comment..is there a certain PHP file i have to look for in WP 2.7 to see if it’s there for this feature to work ?

Yes, that’s a good tip for everyone: To activate threaded comments you have to go to the Discussion tab under Settings in the admin panel and turn on nested (threaded) comments. Otherwise the new script works just like the old script.

Well done, the Typograph theme is brilliant.

Although I have found a potential issue, if you enable “Users must be registered and logged in to comment ” in the settings/discussion this causes for the main control center to appear at the bottom of the page, when there are no users logged in.

So after changing this setting, please log out of the admin panel and then try to read a posting. Currently using the latest wordpress.

Jamiel: I wasn’t aware of that problem but that is definitely not supposed to happen. I’ll look into it first thing next week and see if I can figure out what’s going on.

Hi,
When i put the More Break between words in posts the main control center appear in the bottom…

Also if a link in a post is long it goes on the main control center

This happened in one post when i put the More break… i don’t know why , the post contain only a picture and words

Love Typograph, been using it for about 6 months, but it looks like the WordPress 2.8 update broke something in the theme. After I upgraded, I kept getting this error when I tried to log into the WP Admin dashboard:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare body_class() (previously declared in /home/.equity/MYUSERNAME/MYDOMAIN.com/wp-includes/post-template.php:355) in /home/.equity/MYUSERNAME/MYDOMAIN.com/wp-content/themes/typograph/functions.php on line 10

Any idea if/when there’ll be a fix for this – or if anyone else is getting this error?

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