This is a snazzy dark grey theme with splashes of greenery (hence the name). The original template is an open-source design by Pat Heard from FullAhead.org.

I have included, as of Version 2.0, an Adobe Photoshop template file that allows the painless creation of custom theme “middle-space” images (hint: the “middle-space” is the large section between the main content and the sidebar that has lots of “greenery” in it).

I get lots of questions on this theme surrounding the menu tabs at the top. By default only a few choices are shown (homepage, about page, and the archives) because, quite frankly, there’s not a lot of real-estate up there to be showing a dozen page tabs – and there’s a secondary navigation in the sidebar that shows ALL pages. However, I have included all the PHP code you’d need (inside the header.php file) to allow your pages to be tabbed up top.

[DOWNLOAD] v2.2 – 17 JUL 08 – 732kB

[LIVE DEMO]

• Allows you to fetch all of your Flickr photosets as albums inside your gallery
• Allows you to fetch any Flickr user’s public photosets, recent photos, “favorites”, and/or “most interesting” photos (according to Flickr) and load them as albums inside your gallery
• Allows you to fetch an album of photos from a Flickr group
• Allows you to fetch an album of photos filtered by specific tags
• Allows you to fetch photos at any resolution that Flickr supports
• Allows you to fetch both public AND private Flickr photos that you have READ access
• Allows you to fetch photo descriptions from Flickr to use as photo captions inside your gallery
• Allows manual and programmatic refreshing of your XML images file, or your entire cache of Flickr API calls

The final result is a Flickr photo gallery wrapped in a premiere Flash-based slideshow interface that is delightful to your web visitors.

Visit the official Fetchr4SSP homepage!

Background

This project started for me just trying to finagle my own way of getting all my Flickr photos organized into album photosets and all available in an easy-to-use interface on one of my WordPress-driven websites. A tall order… but I knew it was doable. After fumbling with some WordPress plugins and such, nothing really worked smoothly enough. A Flash solution was needed, so purchased a license for SlideShowPro (SSP) and I couldn’t be happier!

The next task was putting together a PHP script that would build the complex XML needed to properly load all my Flickr photos organized into photosets into SSP. I tried an existing one with some success, but it lacked a few vital functions I needed… and it wouldn’t handle certain SSP abilities. Soooo, I coded my own. And after some polishing decided to put together a sharp website to peddle my fine creation to the masses.

In the end I decided to wrap everything about me into one site. The design had to be bold and vivacious, yet clean and classy. Light on dark was a given. In the end, my nuclear engineering roots provided the inspiration for the design (hence the magenta trifoil and glowing green). I titled it, Nuclear Magic.

However, this new website not only serves as my personal site but was also a great proof-of-concept for using WordPress as a CMS. WordPress is widely regarded as the premiere blogging software… but its potential as a CMS is profound. So many web designers and developers already have WordPress blogs and are familiar with skinning and modding them… and the administrator interface is easy-to-use. Pound for pound you won’t get more bang for your buck when developing a dynamic website. WordPress works great, is free, and is easier to use for what it does than anything else I’ve ever even heard of.

Everything you see at SteveMooradian.com that is not part of the site’s physical design is dynamic. This is extremely significant. ALL images are called out in CSS or in MySQL… not the source files. All main textual content is stored in MySQL. On my Web Design, Programming, and Guitar & Music pages the lists of sites, projects, and bands (respectively) are all WordPress posts with categories matching the page title. The links at the bottom of every non-Home page are actual WordPress “Blogroll” links with categories matching the page title. Except for the Home and Gallery pages, each page is built from identical PHP code!

All my coding was done using Notepad++. All graphic work in the design was created by myself using Adobe’s Photoshop and Fireworks software. All markup is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS3. All of the site conforms to 508 and WAI-A accessibility standards. All dynamic content is semantic. NO TABLES!

I designed the site using progressive enhancement so that I could be search-engine friendly and accessible while also providing a rich user experience to those with Flash and JavaScript-enabled browsers. Examples of progressive enhancement are as follows: I used sIFR to style my headings for users with Flash-enabled browsers. NO images were used for any headings on my site. I used swfIR to style most of my content images for users with Flash-enabled browsers. All drop-shadows and rounding on content images happen dynamically. I used GreyBox for all in-browser popups and image popup galleries for users with JavaScript-enabled browsers.

My new site has already been featured on many CSS and web design galleries… including a prestigious “Editor’s Pick” on the W3CSites.com gallery (which requires strict adherence to valid markup and web accessibility).

In terms of XHTML and CSS I had to rewrite some style to fix the layout of my theme. This custom-made theme I use employs very complex style markup and thus is very sensitive to change, and the upgrade to version 2.1 brought on some small syntax changes.

And then of course there was some PHP I had to rewrite… mostly because version 2.1 handles pages differently in the database schema.

And then I had to patch up my Jumps pages because version 2.1 totally handles link categories differently and also deprecated some primary link PHP functions.

Wow… I guess it was a lot of work now that I think about it.

WordPress Theme – Thin Green Line :: I released version 1.1 of this WordPress theme today. I made many, many tweaks to the cascading style and added some smarter PHP to create the navigation menu. And speaking of this new theme of mine (you know the drill)… if you click here – BlogFlux – and say all sorts of great things… I’ll be your best friend.

Call of Duty :: I was reminded, as I pondered the failed German advance on Moscow, that had Hitler studied his history he might have taken pause at the long land march, what with Napoleon’s embarrassing retreat. And unfortunately for both these brilliant fools they didn’t have the Princess Bride movie to assuage their doomed plans.

You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this… never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
- Vizzini, The Princess Bride

While we’re on the topic, Edward Tufte has some wonderful books on the visual display of information. One of his most well-known pictorial representations of information is a drawing showing the geographic path Napoleon took towards Moscow, and his retreat, and the decreasing girth of the path represents the dwindling numbers of French troops.

A little of the smooth… :: I’m reminded that a similar style of jazz to smooth jazz is Latin jazz. Now not all Latin jazz is smooth, but much of it has a smooth feel to it and can be used as such. A great example is the phenomenal Latin guitarist Jesse Cook. This boy’s got album after album of some stunning smooth latin jazz… perfect for setting some ambiance.

This is called Cube, and it’s a neat little Flash game that brought me flashbacks (get it?) of the ole’ fighter combat strafing runs against the Death Stars (weren’t those the days?). Oh yeah, if you don’t see anything it’s because you don’t have the Flash Player loaded… which is easily remedied if you click here, although it also means that you have a horribly antiquated browser (shame).

Have fun! If I hear lots of hoorays I’ll be more inclined to put more Flash stuff up, as it’s a little heavier on my bandwidth. Oh, and if you enjoyed this Flash game you found here please visit the creator’s website and pay homage.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and it was painless and fun. I’m still getting used to writing from the new interface. I do lament the loss of a couple plugins I enjoyed… including my spel chekker and my image handler.

Update: I’m on pot. And my spell checker and image handler plugins both still work. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

One plugin I was not willing to lose was CG-Amazon… the tool I use to display what I’m currently reading, listening, etc. However, Internet Explorer caused CG-Amazon to hand out two warnings (loud and clear) after upgrading to WordPress 2.0. I contacted the author, David Chait, and we came up with a fix:

Go to your WordPress directory and add the following code to WP-config.php.

// ***** IE-warning fix for CG-Amazon *****
include_once('wp-content/plugins/cg-plugins/error-handler.php');