Jon Hartmann

Tweaking BlogCFC: Theme Management

• December 24, 2008 10:17 PM
• BlogCFC
• Comments (11)

One of the really nice things about Wordpress is that it has a very easy to use admin for managing your blog's theme. Working with the design in BlogCFC is a pain: the design is integrated into the actual code for the blog. Further, the code for designs is strewn through a number of different folders (includes/, images/, tags/, includes/pods/, etc.), which makes it hard to fully update a design. I've made the necessary changes to make BlogCFC handle custom theming as easily as Wordpress: click more to see the details.

First of all, you will need to add a line to your blog.ini.cfm page in order to use the new theme support.

The second step is to download the new client folder from the link below, and install it. I'd love to be able to offer you a line-by-line description of the changes, but I simply had to change too much in order to pull the layout parts into their new locations. Please note that this version of the client does NOT include the other changes to BlogCFC that I've listed in my Tweaking BlogCFC series.

Now all you will need to do is log into your BlogCFC Administrator in order to manage your themes. The download comes with two themes: Default, which is the standard BlogCFC design, and Green Grunge, a new design I threw together.

Installing New Themes

New themes can be installed from zip files containing the theme, or they can be uploaded your your themes/ directory. Using a zip is probably the best method, as the Theme Manager will automatically verify that the theme contains the necessary files.

Creating New Themes

Creating new themes is easy: just copy the Default theme and modify it as you see fit. The name of your theme is based on the directory in which you place your theme. Underscores are replaced with spaces, so the folder test_theme/ is a theme named "test theme".

• test_theme.zip
  • test_theme/
    • comment.cfm - layout for a single comment
    • comments.cfm - layout for multiple comments (uses comment.cfm)
    • footer.cfm - footer
    • header.cfm - header
    • index.cfm - main layout (uses post.cfm)
    • podfooter.cfm - footer for pods
    • podheader.cfm - header for pods
    • post.cfm - layout for a single post (unexpanded)
    • preview.jpg - an image previewing the layout for the admin
    • sidebar.cfm - layout for the sidebar
    • single.cfm - layout for viewing a single post (expanded, uses post.cfm, comments.cfm, trackbacks.cfm)
    • trackbacks.cfm - layout for track backs

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