Extraordinary IT.
Vistered Little Theme
Please read the Security Alert for Vistered Little
I have just stumbled upon the Vistered Little Theme for WordPress and I have to admit I'm smitten. I've switched the site to use it and in the process found a few bugs/issues:
- The default wallpaper is not available in the wallpaper list
- The wallpaper thumbnails require the entire set of wallpapers to be downloaded, making the site very very heavy (at least on first load)
- There are extra images in the images directory that are not references (e.g. old wallpapers)
- There is some redundant PHP code and redundant generated CSS/JS
I've tweaked the theme to fix these issues and you can download it for yourself below:
Updated Vistered Little Theme
If you do download it, do the original author a favor and download it from the Wordpress theme site as well (if you haven't already).
Everything mentioned above is fixed. To overcome the thumbnail issue, there is a new thumbs directory within the wallpapers directory. If there is an image in the thumbs directory with the same name as an image in the wallpapers directory, then the theme will use the image in the thumbs directory as the thumbnail; Otherwise, the wallpaper is used as the thumbnail (same a previous behaviour). This fix is not without side effects; If a thumbs image is used, then when switching to this wallpaper, the background will momentarily become white until the new wallpaper is loaded.
Hope you find the changes useful.
Update 2006-09-05: Added an option for a default wallpaper, fixed more IE issues (there should be none remaining), and wallpaper selection gracefully degrades with javascript turn off.
Update 2006-09-08: Skins now go in the skins directory and are automatically detected. Added the default-flex skin, which isn't visually as nice (IMO) as the default skin, but automatically resizes with the brower width (to certain limits), which I need for some other stuff I'm doing.
Update 2006-09-14: 404 page has been updated for the changes made to support default-flex. Version number is now 1.6a to avoid conflicts with other versions.
Update 2006-12-17: For some reason when vistered little 1.6a is enabled, you can no longer use the theme editor or plugin editor functionality within Wordpress. At this stage the root cause is unknown and there is no ETA on a fix. Sorry 
Update 2007-01-07: Scott from Scott-O-Rama asked if I had a tip jar. Here it is:
Please don't feel obliged, I would actually prefer links to my site. If you do donate, please let me know what feature you would most like to see in your next version. Also, please let me know if you would like the donation to be anonymous.
Update 2007-02-08:It's possible to get the theme editor and plugin editor working again while using vl 1.6a by simply replacing $file with $vl_file in functions.php. 
Update 2007-03-17:Vistered Little 1.7 is now available
Update 2007-05-24:I've closed the comments on this post as 1.6 is no longer supported. Please upgrade to the latest version of Vistered Little.
114 Responses to “Vistered Little Theme”
Windy Road Technology Pty Limited • ACN: 131 679 475 • ABN: 86 131 679 475
20 Heights Cresent • Wamberal • NSW 2260 • Australia
Tom sorry to have wasted your time. I actually found these settings shortly before I came back to tell you “never mind.” Thank you so much again for putting this altogether. This is easily the best theme I’ve used.
@Kiushapo.
1.) You need to use Vistered Little 1.7, the Presentation Toolkit plugin and under, the presentation admin menu, there should be a page for the options for Vistered Little. On that page, set the path to you logo directory and it will randomly pick logos from that directory.
2.) Edit skins/default/style.css.php and adjust the colors to you liking. The Skinner Plugin allows you to edit this file online.
First I’d like to thank you and Nik for all the hard work with this theme. I really like the feel of it. I’m fairly new to Wordpress and I’m learning as I go.
I’ve two questions;
1.) How do I go about doing what you’ve done with the Windy Road graphic in the upper right corner instead of the wallpaper selector?
2.) Second how do I go about changing the color of the font on the default theme that is used for the titles of the posts, and menus. (Currently its a light blue) I’d like to change that if possible.
@Kevin. VL 1.6a is not compatible with the WPG2 plugin, but I did play with it a while ago and it wasn’t too hard to get something started. The biggest problem at the time was that the post width was too small.
Hi again,
I’ve gotten the functions updated and figured out how to get my images working. LMB^filepress works great for this, you can configure it to make the 20 x 20 thumbnails and specify the folders to upload the images and thumb to. Are you interested in some consulting work on this theme? If so let me know how much!
Thanks again…
Hi Tom,
Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to the permalink format. When I use the default permalink format (such as domain.com/p=123) it works fine, but when I change to a custom format (such as domain.com/2007/03/07/post_title) if fails. It appears to be an issue with .htaccess and the version of Apache I’m using.
Thanks for the link to ChrisCJD. I’ll check it out!
@ProphetJoe. You’ve lost me with the archive format. Regarding the post width, checkout the wider skin by ChrisCJD at http://forums.scarylittlemonkey.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=7&page=1#Item_3
Update: actually, by changing the archive format to the default (p=123) format, it works… very strange. Any ideas about changing the frame around the content windows?
Hi Tom, I was wondering if VL 1.6a is compatible with the WPG2 plugin.
Thank Kevin
http://wpg2.galleryembedded.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
Hi Tom,
Just loaded VL16a and switched the functions.php to $vl_files.php. I have 2 issues which I’d like to accomplish, but I’m not sure how to do it.
First, the problem. When I click on the comments link in a window, I get a DB error saying”
“The requested URL /2007/03/09/test-3-w-vl16a/ was not found on this server.” Um, I’ve only got 3 post with a total of 2 comments for testing purposes, but they worked just before I switched from VL to VL16a. Any ideas? I tried changing the archive format, but that didn’t appear to work…
Secondly, I prefer the wider layout of the flex window, but I don’t care for the graphical “scroll” look. Is there a way to get the “standard, round boxes” on the content windows instead — like the windows on the sidebar?
Thanks,
PJ
@MASA. It doesn’t load all the wallpapers on page load (at least not in the major browsers). Instead the thumbnails are loaded and the current wallpaper is loaded. When the reader selects a different wallpaper, this changes the class of the body, which has a different background-image. It is at this point that the selected wallpaper is loaded and is noticeable visually as the background becomes white until the wallpaper is loaded.
@Ministermark. Yeah the “Drag and Drop” term is a bit misleading. You need to copy your new wallpapers into the
vistered-little-1.6a/wallpapersdirectory and your thumbnails intovistered-little-1.6a/wallpapers/thumbnailsBut it loads all the wallpapers. Not just the one being viewed.
Greetings,
Thanks for your great word on VL 1.6a!!!
Can anyone tell me how to add new wallpapers. I can’t seem to make the “Drag and Drop” feature work. I also tried a find and replace $file with $vl_file in functions.php and I still couldn’t edit…
Thanks for the help,
Ministermark
@MASA. That’s a typo which I’ve just fixed. The old version used to load every single wallpaper, rather than just the one being used. Regarding you question, there is no fix. It has to load the wallpaper in order to display it.
“The wallpaper thumbnails require the entire wallpaper to be downloaded, making the site very very heavy (at least on first load)”
When you load the page it still loads the entire wallpaper. Even if I put in thumbnails.
Any idea how to fix this?
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Anyone know the fix for IE7 so that the graphic on top of content boxes work? The theme works in IE7 but breaks a little.
Ah, okay, thanks! Worked perfectly, thanks a lot!
Thank you, your advice worked perfectly.
Kevin.
http://www.kevinscrate.com/blog/
@Kevin. To show the number of post in each category, either use the sidebar widgets plugin, or edit sidebar.php and replace wp_list_cats with wp_list_categories(“show_count=1″);
If you have a look in wp-includes/category-template.php for wp_list_categories, you find all the other options available.
@paul. At the end of skins/.css, where is the skin you are using add the following
#contentcontainer h3 a:hover {
color: red;
}
@kevin. To change the size of the text in the body of the posts, place either of the following at the end of skins/.css, where is the skin you are using
.blog
{
font-size: 200%;
}
or
.blog p
{
font-size: 200%;
}
Hmm, I still can’t seem to get it working. I’m looking in the default.css file, and I’ve changed several values to “ffffff” to see what they do, but so far none of them have had any affect on the a:hover of the post title.
I even tried adding in my own lines of code like so:
h2 a:hover {
color: #ffffff;
}
But that didn’t work. But to be honest I’m not sure “h2″ is the right class to use…which one refers to the post title and how do I chance it?
Thanks again.
Thanks for the quick response, What I wanted to change was the font size for the body of the posts. The default size changes everything (which makes sense) sorry I wasn’t clearer.
Also one other small thing. In the Categories section it doesn’t list how many posts are in each one. Any idea how to fix that.
Thanks again for the great theme.
Kevin
@Kevin. Thanks heaps. Re IE, i’m trying to get my PC setup to run both IE 6 and 7 (via a virtual machine). I should be there soon and then I’ll be able to work on a fix.
Re the default font and size, the top of style.css has the default font (verdana) and default font size (16px). Try changing those and see how you go.
@paul. The “empty” block actually links to more articles when there are more than the configured number. If you have a look at the bottom of my main page, you’ll see what I’m talking about. This box is at the bottom of index.php and you can find it by searching for “previous_posts_link”. You can either put the stuff in your footer in that block, of if you only want it displayed when it’s needed, change the “else” just above, to “else if( is_singular() )”.
Regarding the hover color, you should change this in the skins css file, e.g. skins/default.css or skins/citrus.css depending on what skin you are using. :et me know how you go.
Awesome theme Tom, Been using it for a couple weeks now. and I just sent you some love threw PayPal for your hard work. I had a couple questions if you get a chance. The Theme looks funny on IE 6.0 the body is shifted to the right too far. Works great in firefox.And 1 other thing is there a way to change the default font and font size. I’ve only been using Wordpress for a couple weeks so I’m surprised I’ve gotten this far.
Thanks Kevin
http://www.kevinscrate.com/blog/
Well I actually managed to figure most stuff out, just a couple of things left that I’m interested in knowing…
1) I notice there’s an empty “block” thing at the bottom of the page…when I first installed the theme, I figured that was for the footer(.php). But for whatever reason I wasn’t able to have my footer appear in that black. It took me awhile to figure out how to modify the footer.php file in order to add a new block for my footer, which you can now see @ http://paulfromcanada.com/blog/index.php. This isn’t really a big issue or problem, but I mean I guess it would be nice to be able to get rid of that empty block if at all possible (if you’re unsure what I’m talking about, it’s the empty block between my oldest entry and the copyright message in the footer.
2) The only other thing that I still haven’t managed to fix is the post title link colour onmouseover. I seriously spent at least half an hour going through the style.css file looking for how to change it, but to no avail. Anyways what I’m wondering is, is there a way to get a colour change on the a:hover attribute for the post titles? Like if you look at my page and hover your mouse over one of the titles of my posts, you’ll notice that the colour remains the same. I’m just curious as to how I would go about changing the a:hover colour to something like #ffffff.
Thanks for any help!
@ChrisCJD
Thanks for confirming that.
@Paul
Let me know what kind of changes are you trying to make and I’ll try to point you in the right direction.
Thanks Tom,
That quick fix worked. I am eagerly anticipating the new updated version.
I confirm, wp2.1 and vl 1.6a works.
Have tested on IE 6 (looks funny but works), IE7 and Firefox 2.0
Hey Tom, love what you’ve done with the Vistered theme, it’s definitely one of the best WP themes I’ve seen so far.
I’ve got a few questions about how to change/edit certain things, they shouldn’t be too tricky I just can’t seem to figure out how to do it. Anyways I’d really appreciate it if you could gimme a hand, either on here or send me an email. Thanks again, and keep up the awesome work!
@Leies. I upgraded my local copy of workpress to 2.1 and can’t find any problems
What is the path to the style.css for your installation. It should be something like
http://SOMEHOST/SOMEPATH/wp-content/themes/vistered-little-1.6a/style.css
Can you confirm that is the case for your installation and not something like
http://SOMEHOST/SOMEPATH/wp-content/themes/vistered-little-1.6a/vistered-little-1.6a/style.css
Also, what browser are you using?
@Leies. I’m upgrading to wp 2.1 now. I’ll let you know what I find.
I’m using Vistered Little 1.6a ,
and I’ve try clean install wp2.1 and vl 1.6a , the problem still here ..
Hey there! A great theme, which I’ve put onto my site right away!
I would like to see some kind of dynamic text resizing at the top though, which I might jam in with jQuery shortly. I imagine it should just be a case of increasing the font-size of .class p.
Anyhow, both you and Nik have done a great job on this!
@Leies. Are you using Vistered Little 1.6 or 1.6a? If it’s 1.6 then try 1.6a. There is a link to it in this article.
@Techtweaker:
Good news. I’ve got a fix and a new version will be out shortly (with a few extra features). The quick fix is to go into functions.php and replace $file with $vl_file
I wish there was a fix for the theme editor and plugin editor.
I’ve upgraded to WP2.1 and using back Vistered Little 1.6, there’s some problem, sometimes can’t load all the page , but after several Refresh (F5) , it can load all images and content . sometimes can’t .
When can’t be loaded, it’ll stop after loaded the Date at the sidebar .
I’ve tried other theme works fine ..
Would anyone could fix this theme, I’m loving it !
Thanks a lot !!
Anyone who wants to make the text area larger, I posted a crude fix over at the vistered-little-theme forum:
http://forums.scarylittlemonkey.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=7&page=1#Item_1
Hopefully Tom can make it work so it can be included with the next version?
I also posted a fix for the archives not listing…
Tom, I’m getting the “stylesheet is missing” message when I go to my presentations menu.
Any advice?
@Nik. Cool. I’ve signed up. I’m happy to moderate.
Tom,
The support forum for Vistered Little is up now, let me know if you are interested and I’ll make you a moderator on it.
It’s here
Tom-
I sent you the zip file via Pando as I got a message back from your ISP saying they couldn’t deliver that type of file. Let me know if you have any trouble retrieving it from Pando. http://www.pando.com
I added to the tip jar, but it will be from a different e-mail address. I sent you a message about that.
As for the Google AutoFill naming conventions, I was able to find this: http://www.google.com/support/firefox/bin/answer.py?answer=18183&topic=9178
Does it make any sense to you?
Hi Scott,
Sorry, I meant to email you as soon as I posted the comment. You should have one from me waiting in your inbox.
Re tip jar: Fixed now.
It’s probably the naming conventions. Do you know what they should be?
Tom-
Call me an idiot, but I can’t seem to find your e-mail address anywhere. Can you e-mail it to me so I can send you this zip file?
Thanks for answering all my questions, and so promptly. I tried to use your tip jar donation button, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I will give you a link on my site though in the meantime.
Another problem I just was informed of: The Google Toolbar’s Autofill feature does not correctly fill the information on the comments form. Not a big deal, but I’m wondering if it might be because the form does not use standard naming conventions or something. Any ideas?
Hi Scott,
It really depend on how extensive your customizations are. Send me a zip of your version and I can let you know how easy/hard it would be.
RE the comments page: I’m currently missing the tools to diagnose the problem (new job and new laptop), but I’ll have a quick look when I’m setup again. But to answer you question, I can’t remember that problem and http://vistered.scarylittlemonkey.com/ doesn’t exhibit the problem, so I suspect it’s one of your changes.
Re the wallpaper: I can’t remember exactly how I fixed it, but I moved the inline CSS from the header to a file and in the body tag I use a class to specify which wallpaper to use.
Re Nik quitting: It was just as much a shock to me as everyone else. I’m guessing as with many highly creative and innovative people, new challenges always beckon and maintaining old achievements becomes a chore. The best way to avoid the theme being abandoned is for the community of users to maintain it. I’m happy to accept patches an co-ordinate such an effort.
Re Tip jar: I’ve just added a donation button, if you feel the whim, but don’t feel obliged. If you do, let me know what feature you would most like to see and I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise links to my site are always very welcome.
Hi Tom-
Thanks for your work on the Vistered-Little theme. I’ve implemented the original theme on my site and customized it quite a bit, so I doubt I can easily switch to your version (or can I?).
The question I have it this: people using browsers based on WebKit (Safari, OmniWeb, etc) have noticed that the comments pages on my blog do not display correctly. It works for all other browsers though. Is this something that you were aware of and fixed in your version?
One other thing- my default wallpaper does not display upon the first visit of a visitor to my site. I believe this was a fix of yours in 1.6a. If so, is there an easy way to implement this fix into the original 1.6? Like I said, my theme has been highly customized so it would be extremely difficult for me to switch to 1.6a altogether.
I’m curious if you talk to the original developer of the theme and if so know why he quit developing it. It’s such a great theme I hate to see it abandoned. Thanks for your work on it. Do you have a tip jar?