Andreas09

First in the "Famous Authors" Series

This theme is one of several open source templates by Andreas Viklund (cache) that I expect to make Tiki versions of. His themes are highly rated and have been adapted to a number of CMSs and blog scripts. (Users are kindly asked to not remove the small credit link in the footer. See his copyright page for more information.)

Download:

• For Tiki 5 releases
• For Tiki 4 releases
• For Tiki 3 releases
• For Tiki 2 releases

Color choice and column options

One of several color options can be chosen by (Tiki 2 version) simply uploading/copying the two page-background and link-hover image files from styles/andreas09/alt-img/ into the styles/andreas09/ directory, (or, Tiki 3 version) selecting a theme option in the theme-switching module, etc.

The Tiki implementation reflects the original design's choice of three- or two-column layout through the Admin > Features > General Layout options. A single-column center-only layout is also possible.

What follows is older information, mostly not relevant for the Tiki 3 version, which instead relies on normal Look and Feel admin options:

Site Identity in this theme

The Site Identity feature for the Andreas09 theme is currently configured to be displayed within the colored header section of the page, not above it. This seems to be the smoothest integration with the theme's design.

Turning Site Identity on, for use with this theme, makes it possible to replace the site title and subtitle text lines with a logo in the colored area, and also enables a banner in that area. These can be specified on the Site Identity admin page. To consistently center these two items - which can be various heights - vertically in the header space, I went retro and put them in a table. To position the logo image, banner zone, etc, more precisely, or to add other elements, or avoid using a table for layout, use the Custom Code box in the Site Identity configuration page instead of activating the logo and banner items. Here you can use specific margin heights, etc., for your particular logo image, etc.

The theme's tiki.tpl already contains a search box, so activating this on the Site Identity admin page won't have any effect as the code was removed from the template file, and the breadcrumbs code is not implemented.

Editing tiki-site_identity.tpl

If another way of handling Site Identity is preferred, the templates/andreas09/tiki-site_identity.tpl file can be edited. (This file is a much simplified version of the default tiki-site_identity.tpl.) Be aware, though, that the background image is attached to the page body, not to the header section, and if the height of the header (Site Identity) contents is greater than 52px, the contents that follow will be pushed down the page and will no longer properly overlay the background image (especially noticeable with the navbar).

To get the result shown in the default layout of Andreas09 — the two lines of text — but without having to edit templates/styles/andreas09, just activate Site Identity and its Custom Code, using as content something like

<h1>First Line of Text</h1>
<h2>second line of text</h2>
(top line has h1 tags, bottom one has h2 tags.)

Horizontal menu

The menu (showing the color links on this page) can be changed by editing the templates/styles/andreas09/tiki.tpl file. If this menu needs to be changed often, a dynamic content block tag could be put in the template instead of hard-coded links.

Alternatively, the horizontal navigation bar can be a PHP Layers menu; a PHP Layers menu tag is in tiki.tpl but "commented out" by default. See PHPLayersmenu Horizontal for a demonstration.

Horizontal menu space on error page

The error page (such as for 404 page-not-found errors) also shows the header and horizontal menu sections (tiki.tpl and error.tpl are identical except for the center-middle section of the page). By default the error page repeats the error message in the horizontal menu space. If the horizontal links, etc. are wanted on that page, edit error.tpl the same way tiki.tpl was edited (or copy and paste the tiki.tpl customization into the same section of error.tpl).

PHP Layers tree menu

Andreas09 has its own phplm.css file to style this menu type along with the others.

See also Andreas09 theme details.

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