Viala 1.3 is a clear, wide-open theme in a newspaper-style format, with a feature article and up to 12 article excerpts displayed “at the fold.” Version 1.3 adds several new options to this already highly flexible theme. Below is an explanation of the different ways that the theme can be customized.
Home page options
Visit the theme’s option pages in order to customize the pages and subpages that are displayed in the navigation bar, as well as the number of “subposts” (post excerpts that are displayed under the featured post) to be displayed on the home page. You can also decide which category to designate as the “feature” category, or turn this function off and let the most recent post be the the featured post.
The options page also allows customization of the way that the feature post is displayed. You can elect to display the full post instead of the post excerpt (thus removing the ‘Continue Reading’ link), and you can also reformat the main page to accomodate longer excerpts and long posts (NOTE: If you select only the “Full Post” option, your post will still be cut off at the bottom unless you also select the option to reformat - “Full Post” just removes the ‘Continue Reading’ link, but does not change the format).
Viala also has 2 separate sidebars, one for the home page and one for all other pages. These can be customized in the Widgets menu of your wp-admin screen. In the drop-down menu, select “Homepage Widgets” to start adding widgets to the home page. The widgets you select will fit right alongside your homepage ’sub-posts.’
The image that you see on the homepage, called the “header image,” can be customized - simply go to “Design->Custom Header Image” in your wp-admin screen. This header image will appear next to any feature article on the homepage.
If you wish to temporarily replace the header image with another image that should be associated directly with a given post, see the explanation of the use of the custom field “pic” in “Special Custom Fields,” below.
The “intro” paragraph
By default, the text of the first paragraph of each feature post and single post will be displayed in Palatino font and a larger font-size. This is implemented through the CSS selector “first-child,” and may be thrown off by the inclusion of images, lists, or other elements at the beginning of a post. You can manually apply this effect to any other paragraph by adding the class “intro” to the paragraph in the HTML editor window of the word press Edit Post screen.
Special Page templates
Viala comes with some ready made page templates: a Contact page, an Archives page, and a Links page. To use them, simply create a new Page, and then scroll to the bottom of the edit screen and click on the drop-down menu entitled Page Template. Select the template of your choice. The Contact template includes a contact form, the Archives template presents your last 50 posts in a list, and the Links page displays the links in your blogroll along with each link’s description (you can add and edit the descriptions of your links in Manage->Links in wp-admin [WP 2.5 and later]).
Special custom fields
You can further customize the appearance of your blog through the use of custom fields. These are added through the edit screen of your wp-admin, by clicking on “Custom Fields” under “Advanced Options.”
If you would like to display an image that is associated with a specific post on your home page, without replacing your header image, you can do so by adding a custom field entitled “pic” to the post, and inserting the URL of your image. NOTE: for best results, these “pic” images should be the same size as the header image, ie 400px X 300px.
Single posts can include a table of contents. In your post editing screen, simply create a list of links to anchors within the post, then cut and paste this list into a custom field called “toc.” The list will now appear in the left sidebar of the single post page - post meta info is deplaced to the bottom of the post.
Image alignment and borders
Images within posts or pages will “float” to the left by default, causing text to automatically wrap around them. If you wish to align your images to the right, or not wrap the text at all, simply assign the images a class of “alignright” or “alignnone.” You can do this manually in the HTML window of the text editor in the editing screen, or, when you import an image through wordpress “Add Images” screen (wordpress 2.5 or later), just click on the alignment option that you want
Also, all images will automatically be presented with a polaroid-style border and drop-shadow effect. If you wish to remove this effect from a certain image, simply assign the class “noborder” to the image.
Viala in your language
Viala is fully internationalized (i.e. all of the theme’s static text are “tagged” so that wordpress knows how to present them in the appropriate language), and version 1.3 comes with French and Spanish translations. If you wish to create a new translation for viala, or improve upon the existing translations, the theme’s .pot and .po files are included for your use. Please contact me if you have a new translation - I’ll include it in the next release and credit you as a translator!
For more information, please feel free to leave a comment below.
What’s new in this version (1.3) :
- Increased subpost display options to a maximum of 12.
- Added an option in “Viala Options” to adapt the layout for full posts and/or long excerpts, plus a field for custom “Continue Reading” text.
- Fixed a bug in search.php that was causing empty searches to display a 404 result (created the file nosearch.php).
- Fixed CSS handling of images in posts for better compatibility with basic WP outputs (alignright, alignleft, alignnone).
- Matched the output of the default sidebar to the widget sidebar in functions.php and sidebar.php
- Matched output of home subposts and search/archives.
- Included support for WP image gallery captions in posts.
- Added CSS rules to support wp-smileys.
- Fixed search field so that the text “search” disappears when clicked (thanks to Sadara for the tip)
- Added gravatars to Author pages
- Fixed numerous typographical discrepancies
- Changed layout of Links page from blocks to list with link descriptions
A note about using “pretty permalinks” with Viala : Due to the way in which Viala handles the “subposts” on the first and subsequent pages, if you choose to alter your permalink structure, you should change your “Settings->Reading->Display at most ” posts” in wp-admin to less than or equal your Viala subposts options + 4 (i.e., if you choose to display 3 subposts on the home page, change the ‘Display at most’ setting to 7 or less). Otherwise, the pagination function may be thrown off slightly.
Hi David,
I just installed this theme, very nice, I love the layout! I have a desire to make the front page display more than the four post excerpts. What is your opinion on the easiest way to accomplish this?
Likewise, when clicking “older posts” at the end of the featured article, that second page displays eight post excerpts. I would like the ability to extend both the front page and additional pages to show maybe ten or twenty post excerpts. What are your thoughts on this?
This is a very promising theme for media creators by the way. This theme breaks the blog style format nicely:)
Hi IndieLab,
The range of “subposts” that you can choose from in the admin panel is determined by a function in the theme’s functions file (functions.php in the theme’s folder). Are you comfortable making changes/patches to a php file? If so, I can send you a quick patch with the lines to replace, etc. Shouldn’t be too hard.
Glad you like the theme! Breaking up the usual blog layout was exactly what I wanted to do, so I’m glad that comes across.
Hi David,
Is there any posibility to translate Viala into spanish?
Hi Juan,
The theme is fully “internationalized,” which means that all we need is someone to translate the terms. I speak a little Spanish, so I might be able to give it a go - would you be willing to check my work?
Hello David,
Is your theme WP 2.0 compatible?
My webhost only uses V 2.0 of wordpress.
thanks
great theme, david. thanks a bunch.
i have a problem getting the month strings to display on an archive page, but i’m sure that’s fixable.
Hi Kevin,
I’ve never tested it on 2.0. However, there isn’t anything inherently coded into the theme that relies on newer wordpress elements (that I can think of). I’d say why don’t you give it a try, and please let me know what happens! If you install the theme and you do have some problems, maybe we can try to fix them…
Good luck!
Dave
Hi Sadara -
Actually, after a bit of searching, it turned out to be a quick fix. There were a few functions that were being overridden by other parts of the wordpress core, so we just needed to change a few lines in the archive.php file.
To fix this in your theme, just follow this link :
http://design.davidgarlitz.com/downloads/archive.zip
(which will download a .zip file with the new archive.php file) and upload this file to the “viala” folder in your “wp-content/themes” directory. Should fix the problem - I’ll make sure to include this in the next version as well!
Let me know if anything else comes up!
Dave
Hello Dave,
I’m trying to enable “tags” for the posts as I see them enabled in http://design.davidgarlitz.com/ and I am having difficulty. I am also seeking to structure the main page “sidebar” under the fold. I have no configuration functions in the option page to do so. I want a “recent posts,” a “calendar,” and a “tag cloud” to appear in place of any “subposts.” Please advise.
Terry
Hi Terry,
Glad you liked the theme. I’ll see what I can do to help you out here.
Are you running the latest version of wordpress (2.6.2)? If so, tags are added in one of the menus of the post editing screen. These tags should automatically pop up in the sidebar Tag cloud once you add them.
I see that you’re using the default sidebar on the single-post page, and there’s no “Tags” heading, which makes me think that you might be on an older version of WP - if I’m wrong, let me know.
As far as the options to change the sidebar, this will be (again, in WP 2.6+) in your dashboard under “Design” and then “Widgets.” On the widgets menu you can drag and drop your various sidebar widgets. On the right-hand side, there is a little drop-down menu that gives the option between “Sidebar” and “Homepage Widgets.” You should be able to take it from there…
BTW: I noticed that you’ve made some little changes to the CSS and stuff - right on! - just watch out: if you change the height of your header image on the homepage, you need to adjust the min-height for the div called #main to accomodate the new height. Otherwise, when you get your “sidebar” items in there, they will be partially covered by the header image (it’s floated, so it doesn’t push other non-floated items out of it’s way on a vertical axis). IE doesn’t support min-height, so you’ll need to adjust the “height” for this div in the ie.css file as well.
Hope this helps!
Dave
Dear David,
I am working out minor changes to your theme in order to adapt it to my web magazine, dealing with experimental poetry mostly.
After having started posting articles, I realized the “Category” page seems to be missing, i. e. not present in the theme templates. The problem I had is that width changes in the CSS for the “subpost” part of the index pages do end up modifying the size of the posts in the “category” and “archive” pages as well, making it impossible for me to have at the same time a “four post” 960px subpost area on the index page and a reasonable sized text area on the “category” and “archive” pages… This is visible in the archives page here :
http://myopies-revue.com/p/2008/10/
I added a category template page from the wordpress codex but cannot manage to integrate to it your viala design… The awful result is visible here
http://myopies-revue.com/p/category/textes/
That would be marvelous if you could have a look at my webzine and / or add “category” / “archive” pages to your superb Viala theme…
index page : http://myopies-revue.com/p/
Thank you very much anyway for helping people provide beauty in beautiful shapes…
Yours,
Guillaume
Guillaume :
I’ve taken a look at your site. You are making things harder for yourself than they need to be! I’ll explain: the excerpts on your category page are still using the CSS class “subpost,” which I use in this theme to create the little excerpt boxes that you see on the homepage. The “subpost” class has various CSS rules applied to it to make it behave as it should - lined up properly, not overlapping other “subposts” on the page, etc. I see that in your category.php template, you have added new classes (”.textes,” I think?), but are still using the “subpost” class. This is not only un-semantic, but it’s also counter-productive, as you’ve got to use a lot of CSS rules to override the rules that are already in place for “subposts.”
Why not just remove the class “subposts” from the category.php template? Then you start from a clean slate, and you can decide the width and all the other rules without having to override or counter rules that are already there.
Good luck, and thanks for choosing the theme!
Dave
Hi David,
Thank you for developing this theme. I am currently using this theme for a non-profit organization’s website (sosride.org). I love it. Very clean, uncluttered, and looks dazzlingly professional.
It is tweaked a tad bit; for readability (my primary audience are Palm Springs retirees and veterans) and others (I used your excerptlink class and applied it to other places in the theme).
Thank you so much again.
Hi Dave,
Great theme! Thanks for sharing.
Quick question. Is there an easy way to control whether the text will wrap around an image?
Sometimes I want this: (where X is image and - is text)
XXX——-
XXX——-
XXX——-
———–
——–XX
——–XX
———–
———–
And other times I want
———–
———–
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
———-
———-
———-
I see the first illustration is the default. I’d like a way to toggle the second illustration into effect. Can you help?
Best,
Adam Nelson
Hi Adam -
In the theme’s CSS file, all images found within posts are floated unless they have a class “aligncenter” or “alignnone.”
If you’re using a recent version (2.5+) of WP, any images that you add to the post via the image uploader will be automatically given this class if you select “None” in the alignment choices.
Otherwise, you can add the “alignnone” class to your images directly in the HTML editor of any post or page:
Just find the code containing your image (starting where you see
img), then add inclass="alignnone".Let me know if you have any trouble with that.
Enjoy the theme!
Dave
Hi David
It’s a great theme. I would like to use it for a prototype of a new site in fine arts. Do you have a list of sites allready based on this theme?
Thanks in advance from Zurich/Kloten.
David
hi david -
do you know whether viala will run ok under 2.7? i’ve been reading around and it seems there’s unlikely to be any problem, but i thought i’d check with you, in case you’ve got any thoughts.
all the best
sadara
Hi David, congratulations for your theme, we’re using it for realising a very important issue as you can see in http://www.manifiestoperiodismoyderechoshumanos.com/english-version/
The thing is that, in the home page, we eventually have decided to show the whole text of the manifiesto, and not just a hint. How could I remove the “excerpt” option to get the full post on the home page?
On the other hand, I need to displace the menu bar a little lower, I don’t know if you would help you on that too.
As you see, I’m quite naïf in this CSS thing. Thanks so much!
Nice, clean site David, and good photo and customization features too. As usual, I want to tweak a few things, and since there isn’t a custom CSS and I’m still a novice, I’ll need your advice.
I’d like to change the font, size and color of the the blog title for a cleaner look. Right now it doesn’t quite fit above the line on the home page. Likewise, the page titles would be black, with a little vertical elbow room, don’t you think?
By the way, even though the link says version 1.3, it downloads 1.2.1, is there something I’m not seeing? Reason I ask is that, the search improvement you listed, where clicking there clears the word “search”…? That’s not happening for me either.
Bear with me as I come up to speed with Wordpress, I’m using 2.6.3 now.
Hi David -
I do know of a few other sites that are using this theme:
sosride.org
knowledgeeratlarge.net
sadara.be
These are just the folks who have contacted me to let me know that they’re using the theme. Beyond that, I have no way of knowing who’s using it or not (the theme has now been downloaded well over 1,000 times, but that doesn’t mean that there are 1,000 sites using it!).
I do think that the theme is well suited to presenting visual art - I had photoblogging in mind when I started putting it together. If you do end up using the theme, make sure to download the new version (v1.3) which has a few more options, and if you’d like I do customizations at very reasonable rates.
Thanks for your interest, and good luck with the site!
Dave
Juan Luís - Are you using the newest version of Viala (1.3)? There is a new option that allows just what you are looking for - easy switching between excerpt and full post display of the feature article.
Dave
Marc -
Try again, and you should get the new version.
Sorry! I forgot to update the links to the correct .zip file. How embarrassing
As far as the CSS goes : all of the changes you mentioned can be accomplished by editing the ’style.css’ file in the theme folder. Go ahead and give it a shot - if you need help, I charge very reasonable rates for customizations! Don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Enjoy the theme!
Dave
Sadara - I’ve just started working with the beta version of 2.7. So far everything seems to work, but I’ll let you know if I find anything.
Dave
Hi David-
I’m using your theme on my website (running 2.6.2). I’ve noticed on Pages with comments enabled that the sidebar is running under the comments in the main area of the page (the post area) instead of in the sidebar area. It doesn’t happen when I turn commenting off, however. It also happens on Posts with comments enabled, so I’m guessing it has to do with something not being properly closed in the comments.php file. Any advice on a fix would be appreciated.
Hi Kim -
I see the problem - your sidebar is not just on the wrong part of the page, it’s actually “in” the comments form when you look at the code. So, as you say, something is not properly closed. However, I’ve double-checked the comments.php file, and everything is fine there.
Are you using a plugin to add those HTML buttons to your comments area? That’s the most likely culprit. It’s gone in and inserted those buttons, but left off a closing tag somewhere and thus the last tag of the form doesn’t get closed like it should.
To test my theory: try reverting to the basic WP comments (i.e. disactivate the plugin, or if this is a hand-coded mod., save your changes somewhere and reinstall the theme), and see if you still have this problem. Let me know what happens!
Dave
Hi Dave-
Thank you so much for your quick response and for taking the time to look at my problem.
You’re exactly right. The plugin hadn’t caused an issue with my previous setup, and in debugging I didn’t realize it was still activated. The plugin in question is Comment Quicktags 1.9. As I probably should have expected from past experience, it’s the plugin, not the theme that is wonky. I’ll take a look in the plugin code and see what I can find. I’m not much for writing code, and even less for debugging, but it might be a fun challenge when I have a little time. I’ll at least let the author know.
Cheers!
Kim
This is a nice magazine inspired theme. However, after tweaking a little bit, I couldn’t find how to remove the left sidebar on single post so that I can expand the right sidebar. How do I increase the width of the right sidebar and totally remove the left sidebar (i.e. tags, categories).
Thanks!
Hi, i would like to use your theme for a website. But how do i change the background colors? Sorry, i’m relatively new to customizing themes. But I love your layout.
Thank you!
Ellen and K - Both of you are asking for changes that can be made by editing the CSS file. If you know a little bit about editing CSS, go ahead and open up the file “style.css” in the text editor of your choice, and you should be able to work from there.
If you’re not comfortable making those changes yourself, don’t hesitate to get back in touch - I charge very reasonable rates for custom work!
Dave
Thanks Dave, I tried to edit the stylesheet but it breaks the index page if increasing the width of the sidebar in a single post.
Cheers!
Hi David,
I am looking to use your Wordpress theme Viala - I find it elegant but clean, which I like a lot - but would like to modify it a bit. I want to use Wordpress as my main CMS and thus I need the blogging functionality - right side bar, comment window, etc - to show only on the blogging page and not on the non-blogging pages. Also, I want to make the home page not the blog page, but a proper introduction to the site. How can I achieve these two things?
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Dan - Glad you like the theme!
Some of the modifications that you are talking about are pretty easy to achieve from within WordPress’ admin options.
For example, if you want to remove the comments field from a page or post, you can uncheck the box labelled “Allow Comments” in the Comments & Pings section of the edit screen (near the bottom).
Also, if you want the main “feature article” to stay on the home page, you could assign that article to the category that you select as your feature article (in Viala options) and then just leave it there and update your other categories.
As far as the right sidebar goes, changing that would require a bit of editing in the actual php files - you could, for example, create a new Page template that doesn’t include the call to sidebar.php…
If you’re not sure what all this is about, but you want to tackle this on your own, do some reading on the main wordpress site (start with wordpress.org/docs) - the kinds of modifications that you want to do are more relevant to the way that wordpress works than specific to this theme.
Good luck!
Dave
Hi David
I’ve just installed your theme on my new blog - thank you for providing a different style of design!
I’ve also taken advantage of your contact form template, which all worked fine, and you’ve even provided a thank you page. Could you just let me know how I can edit the picture that goes alongside the text.
Thanks very much.
Olivia
Hi Olivia - Yep, there is a little thank you message displayed when a message is sent from the contact page. Neat, huh?
This image is also the one displayed if you ever use the sidebar widget called “About.”
To change it, just grab whatever jpeg image you want to use, rename it (or make a copy and rename that) to “profile.jpg,” and upload it to the the “img” folder within the theme folder (i.e. yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/viala/img). For best results, format your image ahead of time to be around the same size as the original profile.jpg - 76px wide and 106px tall.
I’m glad you like the theme - enjoy it and happy blogging!
Dave
dave -
viala seems to be very popular. try googling design.DavidGarlitz.com!
very nice
Mr Garlitz, I like this theme very much.
it is definately an elegant theme, and i’m very happy i came across it today.
I’ve been away from coding and tweaking for a long time, forgetting how to do CSS things and seek your assistance/advise on one of the sites i wish to use your theme which has a “media” page i use for posting of video and audio clips.
From your discussion of the “intro” paragraph, it sounds like no font styling will be captured in the opening paragraph, like bold text. This is what I’m experiencing in my posts. Also sounds like if you include an image in the opening paragraph, it might screw up the design. Is that correct? Is there a way around these issues? Is this the CSS code pertaining to it, overriding any other font styling?
#main p.intro strong, p.intro a, #main p:first-child strong, #body .post p:first-child a {
font-weight: normal;
Thanks, MZ
This is a nice clean template and I like the easy way it works. I have test driven a few themes and this one is by far the best. I have just two questions. The Header seems a little scrunched together. Can I fix it? and also the Search thing is under my post title. Can I fix that too? If you answer these questions, bear in mind that I am 60 years old, new to blogging and if it weren’t for the Dummies books, I wouldn’t be here at all.
Thanks for your help
Hi msmillion,
Yes, one of the drawbacks to the theme is that the header doesn’t accomodate long blog titles and/or many pages in the navigation. The only way to fix this easily is to either a) remove some of your pages from the navigation bar OR b) edit the CSS file (the file called style.css in the theme folder) to make the font size smaller on your blog title…
The scrunched-ness of the blog title/blog description can also be edited in the CSS file.
Dave
Marc - Yes, the line that you pointed out in the CSS is indeed the one that governs bold text in the “intro” paragraphs. However, if you’re talking about the paragraph on the Home page, note that unless you change the default settings, this paragraph is a WP-generated excerpt. When WP makes excerpts of posts, it strips out any HTML and just leaves the text, so no amount of changing the CSS will reveal your bold text there.
If you still want only an excerpt to show on the Home page, but want bold text as well, use the Custom Excerpt field in the post editing screen.
Dave
ERUSSELL - How can I help? Can you be more specific about what you’d like to change/fix/set-up?
Dave
hello dave (and other users of viala 1.3) -
i updated my wp to version 2.7 a few days ago. everything went very smoothly and viala 1.3 seems to have come through unscathed.
as far as i can see, everything’s fine.
I replaced my fathers old wordpress theme with this one, and we are very happy with it. It is very easy to navigate and the layout is perfect for his Cajun Language site (and it looks great too). Thank you for this theme!
Hi Dave,
Thanks for a great template!!! You have a superb eye for layout… when I found your template and tried it, it was like coming home.
Jeff
Hello Dave. Your theme is working well in WP 2.7.1. I really like it!
BTW, there is a simple way to find out who is using your theme. Just Google “design.DavidGarlitz.com” and literally thousands of pages using your theme will pop up.
great design, very thanks..
works fine in WP 2.9.