New theme/layout preview.

Christine

We have a new theme/layout that we are running on the main site that we want to introduce to you here. It enables us to do a lot of things that we can’t do using this old theme.

It will look similar to this, but not identical.

Themis/MBD can give you a better idea of the tweaks that we are running over there. They both rock at CSS and other tech stuff. I’m not so great at that, so I’ve just been along for the ride. But we really like the functionality of this theme!

Let us know thoughts below.

Darth was asking about post breaks, so I’m going to explain how to do it using classic editor.

Up at the top, there is a choice between visual and text. On visual, if you look at the bar, you’ll see an icon towards the bottom right that looks like a freeway (solid line/dashed line/solid line). That will insert a “read more” tag on the timeline, and the whole post shows when you click it. If you are in “text,” the button that says “more” inserts the read more tag.

Only in visual can you “see” the page break icon, next to the “more” icon, which breaks your post into multiple pages.

You can use either. I used the “read more” tag on this post.

14 thoughts on “New theme/layout preview.”

  1. As Christine said, there are a few enhancements to functionality on the new site that we’re not bringing over here – so this is mostly about the overall aesthetics and how easy it is to navigate around.

  2. My initial thoughts after a quick scroll are that the layout is neat and clean and I like it. I’m happy to see bylines at the top of posts and comment links at the bottom. I’m bummed there’s no infinite scroll, but I can live with the “Older Posts” button. But one of Mike’s block editor tutorials highlighted a couple of issues for me:

    #1. The whole loooooong post is visible on the timeline. Is there some sort of post shortening + “see more” functionality available?

    #2. The videos auto-play. Is there a way to stop that, either site-wide or in individual user settings?

    1. Addendum: I’m still poking around and was momentarily confused by the two separate navigation bars at the top. The one under the banner looks great, btw! But does anyone know what the top bar will look like to non-admin users? Is that where the add new content functionality will always be located?

    2. There is a way to insert a page break into a post so that super-long posts don’t take up the timeline, and we’ve already discussed adding a tutorial about it and gently encouraging people to insert them into very long posts.

      Give me a minute, & I’ll edit this post to show you!

      It’s also likely that there is a way to turn off autoplay, but I don’t know how and will refer the ? to MBD.

          1. Which is even more confusing because from what I read it’s supposed to be just a browser setting. I tried to peak at how these were put into the post, but the block editor just about defeated me.

            I found reference to autoplay=no but not in an html tag. I’ll have to do more investigating.

  3. I like it as well. I agree with DP that it looks very neat and clean. I also think it still had a BL-like feel to it, which is something that’s important to me.

    I haven’t had much time to play around with it yet, but it looks easy to navigate.

    1. Whew. So far, so good: you and DP both like it. I think we about killed ourselves going through themes trying to find one that would work, and I’m honestly not sure there isn’t a single 2 column layout we didn’t try and discard for feature failures, before coming to this one.

    1. I’m glad that you like it, Wanda! It’s working really well on the “real” site, and I’m very excited to start unveiling. We’ve got a ways to go before we are ready to go live, but things are moving forward nicely!

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