Simplish 2.1.4 is an update to support WordPress 2.7, including the new threaded comments feature.

• Support WordPress 2.7’s threaded comments.¹
• Add compatibility comments template for WordPress ≤ 2.6.5.
• Link to comments goes to heading of comments list (instead of to first comment in list).
• Fix silly feed:// typo in (default) sidebar syndication links (thanks eighty4.se).
• Fix “comments” id and class to not have same name (introduce “commentslist”).
• Use smaller 32×32 gravatar for comment author.

Download Simplish version 2.1.4 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

¹ - Threaded comment support has not yet been added to WordPress-mu, the software this blog and the Simplish Demo run atop. Until it is, you can check out Simplish’s rendition of threaded comments at a test site.

Another little gift for the holiday: Here’s a new production edition of Simplish. This is the one you should be using on your real site, you know, where you don’t run pre-release software like Simplish 2.1.4RC, or WordPress 2.7-beta…

Version 2.1.3 is a tiny update that contains just one change: a contributed header background graphic (thanks to both Anonymous and Demetris) that’s 10x smaller than the original, down from ~2.7 Kilobytes to a super-slender 256 Bytes.

In other words, this update is definitely not a big deal. But it does trim the theme’s only image down to a size smaller than… most of your blog posts, and might help (a very little bit) with bandwidth or page load times if you’re using Simplish on a very-busy site.

Download Simplish version 2.1.3 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

As mentioned in comments on my original mild objection, I’ve been convinced that threaded discussions, new in the upcoming WordPress version 2.7, are a good value at the price. So today I slapped support for the feature into Simplish. This version of the theme should be considered “beta” quality, just like the new WordPress features on which it’s built. Both are subject to change before final release.

Demo

http://labs.utopian.net/who/josh/wp-svn/?p=1

Code

simplish-2.1.4RC.tgz

The demo shows a “jacob’s ladder” style for the comments/replies layout, where both left and right margins are indented per-thread-level. It’s an (experimental) attempt to ease the “comment chaos” feeling a deeply-threaded discussion can give.

A special thanks to Otto for his comments and his indispensable threaded comments getting-started doc.
More…

We have a very-roughly monthly release schedule, and as our infrequently-honored date of the 20^th approaches, the fix I have is a good one, but the only one: Anonymous contributed to the sibling sp theme a new background header image in PNG form at just 10% of the original’s size.

If there are other corners we could tidy, let us know with a comment here - that includes providing specific examples for the reported issue with some AJAX sidebar widgets and Simplish v2.1.2, as well as the question about the importance of threaded comment support -vs- the simplicity of loading no JavaScript.

Very nifty rework of the simple Simplish base into the theme on Inte en jävla blogg. I don’t read Swedish, but I know cupcakes make me happy, too!

From what I can make out from systrans and Briannatrans, the author had a good day at work. Good for her, and nice work on that theme, too.

In a context completely unrelated to “threaded” discussion comments on blog posts, Rob Pike once wrote:

Threads are like salt. I like salt, you like salt, we all like salt. But we eat more pasta than salt.

Implementing (what will eventually be) WordPress 2.7’s new threaded comments is not difficult, and doing so yields a moderately useful new organization element: threading, or individual replies, similar to the presentation of discussion forums, many newsreaders, the Gmail message list, or the Twitter @. This post by Ottodestruct has plenty of info to get you started against the latest subversion tip to get threaded comments working in your theme.

Many themes are built with, even around, JavaScript. If Simplish already loaded even one script, we’d certainly add the cool new threads. But Simplish is supposed to be simple, and it is supposed to be a feature that the theme loads no JavaScript in a default configuration.

I will probably link to a quick alpha Simplish with cut-and-paste test code for a threaded comments template shortly, but I’m interested in opinions right now.

I like working with the Habari publishing software, and even moved my personal site to a Habari base recently. In that process, I created a sorta-port of Simplish — more of a sibling version, really — for Habari blogs. It’s called sp, and takes its moniker from the function prefix used in Simplish: sp_. You can check out a demo of sp, or download the theme for either the release, or the svn, versions of Habari, but I haven’t put together a slick theme site like this one yet.

Sp has the usual suspects from Simplish, like microformats (hAtom posts and hCards for their authors), clean and terse styling that loosely imitates the design of Jeffrey Hardy’s Scribbish “theme for stuff”, wrapped in valid markup output to the browser. It’s just implemented in the leaner, more perspicuous idioms of the Habari RawPHPEngine.

This release contains fixes for some minor bugs, and switches to relative (em) font sizing.

• Replace deprecated get_settings() call with bloginfo().
• Improve and simplify hCards for authors, commenters, and the theme footer link, removing mis-used n class (thanks Martin McEvoy @ weborganics.co.uk).
• Further define and improve Windows fall-back fonts in CSS (thanks Demetris @ op111.net).
• Define fonts with relative (em) rather than absolute (px) sizes, allowing resizing in IE6 (thanks op111.net).
• Specify body element background-color (thanks op111.net).
• Use a more humane representation of the date in day archive page h1 element (no leading zero).

Download Simplish version 2.1.2 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

We focused on cleaner, more orderly CSS and some code factoring in this release. Visual changes are minor, but post metadata display is tighter, while line heights have been widened ever-so-slightly for easier readability in long text passages.

• Fix spacing below Tag Cloud sidebar widget above certain elements (thanks op111.net).
• Rename hCard generator functions more rationally.
• Uncompress line heights.
• Remove explicit permalink from entry meta display; entry title now serves uniformly.
• Remove the Meta label from entry meta section; unnecessary.
• Add per-comment permalink on comment date.
• Style more basic elements: table and dl styles improved/added (adopted bits of Blueprint CSS).
• Removed remaining uses of visual alignright/alignleft convenience classes in favor of more-semantic class names in the template markup.
• Add entry meta display to image attachment template.
• Improve fall-back fonts in CSS (thanks op111.net).
• Split entry title/byline and meta into include files that produce the main hAtom microformatting.

Download Simplish version 2.1.1 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

Now that Mitchell Hashimoto has started up his outstanding Erlang notes and links blog spawn_link, I’ve already learned more about Erlang and how she is wrote than I ever knew - and we’ve been running ejabberd for remote developer chat for almost a year.

Of course I found spawn_link because it’s running Simplish - but I was subscribed to the feed before I left. Mitchell’s post about grouping program parts together into single-management-point units with Erlang’s application module was enlightening, and like a lot I learn about Erlang, describes runtime features that certainly evoke, if not replace, those of the operating system.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about Erlang, but about a cool site running the theme, so I’ll just say: Vive le CSP!