New Theme: Zinmag Redux

Posted by Michelle Petit-Sumrall as Miscellaneous

So, just installed this GORGEOUS theme on the main Moondance Blog, and I’ve been trying to play around with it. At the time I began this postⁱ, the tabber div wasn’t working, nor was the glide function working. As I was writing, I would think of something else to try, in order to fix my problems, so I would stop writing the post, go try it, and report back here. This is the unexpected account of that journey. For the record, I was completely NOT involved in developing Zinmag; I just happen to have enough experience testing things to have done this and know how to test for troublesome code.

Also, I can’t sleep. Anyway, on with it!

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First, I meant to get the tabber div working. For the non HTML coders out there, it’s the place where the video, the popular posts, and the login/admin module are supposed to show up.

Interestingly, when I looked at the source code, the div exists, but it doesn’t show up (Firefox 3 or IE 7).

So, I removed all my sidebar widgets in case something was interfering.

No help.

So then I uninstalled all my plugins except the maintenance one and the Popularity plugin that came with the theme.

Better. Now the tabber div actually shows up. Oh joy!

Only major problem that remained was the glide function, nothing was showing up. I realized I hadn’t properly uploaded my updated “glide.php” file. That file is inside the zinmag-redux-theme folder. Open in Notepad or whatever other text editor you like (but do avoid using Microsoft Word, please!), and find the lines that start with :

<div class=”glidecontent”>

Here’s the important thing: those lines appear SIX TIMES in the file, and you will have to edit every single one of them. Change the word “uncategorised” to the names of your categories. If you don’t have six categories, that’s ok, except for one thing: the correct spelling of the word, the one Wordpress uses, is “uncategorized” (with a ‘z’). Change the spelling in the glide.php file. That way you will get something to show up, rather than a blank spot.

Now I began reactivating plugins, and I finally found at least one guilty party: Shadowbox_JS interferes with some of the AJAX this theme uses. All of us a sudden, tabber was gone again.

BUMMER! I love Shadowbox JS!

Not as big a loss is discovering that Quote Rotator breaks the headline rotator (that gliding thing). Not sure what that’s about, especially as I hadn’t actually positioned it in a sidebar or anything, but there it is: Headlines doesn’t work with Quote Rotator on.

A couple more notes:
- If some headers don’t show up (in my case, the “Recent Posts” header at the bottom of the page), mouse over where the text should be. It’s possible it’s actually there but the CSS is incorrect. Open up “style.css” (it’s in zinmax-redux-theme), find the line that starts with .recents. Just above that, add the following code:


.recents h2 a {
color: #ffffff;
}


Adjust the color to whatever works for you. Problem solved!

- If you’re having trouble understanding the thumbnail images, lemme try to sum up. (You might have to open another browser tab to follow along.)

Write your post, decorate it with all the images, sounds, and videos you want. Or none: that doesn’t matter. What matters is telling the post that an image is associated with this particular post.

Add an image from either your media gallery, or upload a new one. You don’t have to add this image to your post, just make sure it has a name in the “title” field.  In this example, I gave the image the title of “screenshot” (highlighted in yellow – click the image to see it up close).

Now scroll down past the bottom of your post, to “custom fields”. Make sure it’s open.
Under where it says “Add a new custom field:”, the left side says “key”, and the right says “value”. Type in “homethumb” on the key side, and the title of your image (”screenshot” in our example here) on the value side. Click “add custom field”, save or publish your post, and you should have done it!
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The new blog will go live as soon as I’m done tweaking it to our needs.  I do need to modify the theme a little.

1. I originally posted this on the official Zinmag Support forum. [↩]

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