In the months past I’ve received a lot of messages, comments and emails, each asking something about Simple Balance. To some I have answered, to others I couldn’t, due to various reasons (mostly time).

Please understand that the simple fact that I released this theme for free is a “support” action itself, and most times, my daily activities do not allow me to help everybody in their quest to customize this theme the way they want to. That would mean to cut time from my clients’ projects to offer support for this free theme. I am sure that you can understand this situation.

That’s why, for a limited period of time, I’ll check out this post daily and try to answer any question you might have, be it design or source code related, as long as it is about Simple Balance. If you have previously asked the same thing on another topic, or sent a mail and did not get an answer, please ask again here so that I can answer your questions.

So… fire away!

PS: Some questions could already be answered in these posts:

• Simple Balance – Right Sidebar Alignment Bug Fix
• How to Add Your Logo to Simple Balance
• FeedBurner Email Subscription in Simple Balance 2.0

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It has been brought to my attention that the Simple Balance theme has a display bug which causes the right sidebar to drop below the content on single post pages.

After looking into this problem I’ve seen that this only happens when users are required to be logged-in in order to post a comment.

The bug is fairly easy to fix and a fix has already been included in the Simple Balance 2.2 download package.

In order to apply the fix, you only need to download the package and replace the “comments.php” file in your theme’s folder with the one inside the package.

Manual bug fix

Alternatively, you can apply the fix manually by opening the “comments.php” file in a text editor and scroll down to the end of the file where you should see this code snippet:

</form>
</div>

<?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?>

<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

All you need to do is to replace the above lines of code with the ones below:

</form>

<?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?>
</div>

<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

The closing tag of the comments section should have been placed outside the conditional loop that checks if the user is logged in. Since it was not, the sidebar was considered to be part of the comments area and displayed below.

Sorry for the inconvenience if you have had trouble because of this bug. Now it should be alright.

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Thanks to the amazing involvement of Florian from Floeschen.ch, the Simple Balance theme has been translated to German, from front-end to the extensive control panel.

As Florian and I have agreed, the translated version will only be available from his blog and is to be considered the only official German release. Otherwise we could not guarantee for the safety of the scripts.

All future updates of Simple Balance will also be translated by Florian and released by him on the same page that the current version is available from.

Here’s the link: Simple Balance WP Theme auf Deutsch

Thank you Florian for the hard work!

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Simple Balance 2.2 is now available for free downloading. Although it was previously working with the recently released WordPress 2.7, now, the theme has built-in support for threaded comments (you can reply to people’s comments with a maximum depth of 3 steps) which is a new functionality added by the latest WordPress release.

If you’re running a WordPress version prior to 2.7, fear not! The comments section has backwards compatibility.

Another cool feature has been added to the options panel and it refers to the 125×125 right sidebar banners. Now, you can also add Google AdSense code, individually, for each of your banners.

And that’s not all! Christmas is around the corner, and so’s the New Year.

New color scheme: Xmas Edition

Why not give your Simple Balance themed blog a cool new color scheme to match the Holiday spirit? A new color scheme – Xmas Edition – has been added, raising the total number of schemes to 10!

Here’s a quick preview:

Upgrading from prior versions

If you’re upgrading from 1.0 or 2.0/2.1, all you have to do is to copy the new files over the old ones, overwriting those that already exist (if you haven’t done changes to the theme) and adding the new ones.

Once you’ve uploaded the files, by simply entering the theme’s options panel (Design/Appearance > Simple Balance 2.2 CP) the new options will automatically be installed.

Happy Holidays!

It’s time to give you blog a nice present!

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By popular demand, I decided to publish a short tutorial on how to add your own logo to the Simple Balance WordPress theme.

So, in order to achieve this we’ll walk through the following steps:

1. The logo image guidelines and instructions;
2. Files to update;
3. Code explanation.

The logo requirements

In order to achieve the best implementation quality of your logo, you should consider saving you logo with a transparent background. A .gif file will work well, and if you’re using a software like Adobe Photoshop to edit your images, when saving the image (File > Save for Web & Devices…), setting the Matte to white would be good. This will ensure that the margins of your transparent background logo will look good on Simple Balance’s light background color.

As you can see on the live demo, I’ve used a .gif image for logo, and basically, this is what you are about to achieve with your own blog too.

Once you’ve saved your image, upload it to the “img” folder inside the Simple Balance theme folder (wp-content/themes/simplebalance/img). From here, we’ll link to it later.

Quick tips

1. Save your logo with transparent background;
2. Save it with a white matte;
3. Keep the width below 200 pixels, as that’s the maximum space reserved for the logo;
4. Write down the size of the image (width and height), as we’ll use them later.

Adding the logo in your CSS stylesheet

Now that you have uploaded the logo on your FTP, it’s time to add it to the design. There’s only one file you’ll need to update, and that is style.css, which is located in the root folder of the theme.

Open the file with a text editor (a basic Notepad should suffice) and look for this lines of code:

.topLogo h1 a, .topLogo h2 a {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #d90202;
}

Select the whole block and replace it with the following code:

.topLogo h1 a, .topLogo h2 a {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #d90202;
	display: block;
	width: 156px;
	height: 42px;
	background: url(img/name-of-your-logo-file.gif) no-repeat;
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Be careful

… and don’t forget to replace the values in this new block of code with the real values of your image, as follows:

width: 156px;

The ’156′ value should be the actual width of your image. ’156′ is only a width I used as an example. Do not delete the ‘px’ text as it defines our measuring unit.

height: 42px;

The ’42′ value should be the actual height of your image. ’42′ is only a width I used as an example. Again, be careful with the ‘px’.

background: url(img/name-of-your-logo-file.gif) no-repeat;

Replace ‘name-of-your-logo-file.gif’ with the actual name of your logo file.

The ‘display’ and ‘text-indent’ properties are meant to ensure the correct display of your logo, so you should not worry about those, but keep them. They are important.

Once you finish the editing, save the file and reupload it to your server. Et voila, the logo should be there the next time you check you blog.

A good idea…

…would be to go to the Simple Balance Control Panel (WP administration > Design > Simple Balance 2.1/2.0 CP) and uncheck the box that displays the blog description. Of course, only if you think it affect the design, or the new logo in a bad way.

If you have any questions, i’ll be happy to answer in the comments section of this post.

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One month and 2000 downloads later, the new version of the Simple Balance Free WordPress theme is released.

New options have been added – along with the options of Simple Balance 2.0 – to the theme’s control panel, including:

1. Easy to set up featured post (does not use categories);
2. Google AdSense alternative for both the top and right sidebar ad space;
3. Easy to set up email subscription form; *
4. Page selection for the top menu (only selected parent pages will be displayed);
5. Two brand new color schemes: Blue Bubble and Curly Green

* Works only with Google’s version of FeedBurner. For other versions, code editing is required.

Upgrading from prior versions

If you’re upgrading from 1.0 or 2.0, all you have to do is to copy the new files over the old ones, overwriting those that already exist (if you haven’t done changes to the theme) and adding the new ones.

Once you’ve uploaded the files, by simply entering the theme’s options panel (Design > Simple Balance 2.1 CP) the new options will automatically be installed.

Everything is under control…

… and now it’s time to OWN you WordPress blog!

Have a look!

See the goodies that await you with Simple Balance 2.1.

Get your copy now for FREE and expect more beautiful updates and color schemes every month!

Special thanks go to Shantanu Goel (@shantanugoel)for providing essential help and feedback, and to Ronald Huereca for writing an excellent guide on WordPress custom queries.

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Since its launch, over 1800 people downloaded the Simple Balance 2.0 WordPress theme. For that, I thank each and every one of you!

The idea behind this theme was to keep it as simple as possible, yet effective. Simplicity in administration is one of the keywords behind its creation. But some things need a bit of coding knowledge to tweak.

One of them is the email subscription form, which, once you install the theme, serves only as a design template that does not work unless proper code has been added to it.

I’ve been asked via comments and email what’s wrong with it, or how can it be made functional and this made me write the following step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate the FeedBurner email subscription form in Simple Balance 2.0.

Getting the FeedBurner Email Form Code

Here’s a quick screenshot that illustrates the required steps:

Step 1: Click the Publicize tab;

Step 2: Look for the Email Subscription item in the left side menu and click it;

Step 3: Copy the form code and paste it in a .TXT file for later use.

Once you’ve pasted the code in a .TXT file, you’ll see that it looks a bit blocky, not being properly formatted using new lines and TAB’s.

Below is a sample of my code (do not copy it unless you want your readers to subscribe to my feed). Try to come to a similar formatting by breaking the line in the same places I did it.

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/
fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true">
	<p>Enter your email address:</p>
	<p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p>
	<input type="hidden" value="Blogsessive" name="uri"/>
	<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>
	<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" />
	<p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com"
	target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>
</form>

Unless you want to display the link back to FeedBurner, you can delete right from the start the following line:

<p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>

Editing the Simple Balance 2.0 Email Subscription Form

Now that you have the FeedBurner form code, all you need to do is to integrate it with Simple Balance’s custom designed form.

No need to panic, as it’s a much easier job than it seems. First, you need to locate the theme’s files and open the file called lsidebar.php with your preferred HTML (or simply Notepad) editor.

Next, you need to locate the following chunk of code (normally starts of line 22):

<h2>Subscribe by Email</h2>
<ul>
	<li class="rssForm">
		<form action="">
			<input type="text" class="rssEmail" />
			<input type="submit" class="rssSubmit" value="Subscribe" />
		</form>
		<small>We take privacy seriously.<br />
		Your email address will <strong>not</strong> be shared.</small>
	</li>
</ul>

Now, go to the FeedBurner form code and copy the one part that is similar to mine as shown below:

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/
fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true">

The only difference is that instead of ‘uri=Blogsessive’ it will have your blog’s name.

Remove the styling contained in this line by taking out this chunk of code:”

style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"

and copy the remaining code (similar to the one below):

<form action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,
height=520');return true">

Ok, did you copy the code? Now, let’s head back to the lsidebar.php file, to our previously selected chunk of code.

Locate this code:

<form action="">

and replace it with what you’ve copied from the FeedBurner code.

While we’re here, locate this line of code:

<input type="text" class="rssEmail" />

and replace it with this one:

<input type="text" class="rssEmail" name="email" />

Now, we head back to the FeedBurner code to copy the two lines similar to these:

<input type="hidden" value="Blogsessive" name="uri"/>
<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>

Again, instead of value=”Blogsessive” you’ll have your blog’s feed name. After you copy the two line, go back to lsidebar.php and add them below the previously edited line:

<input type="text" class="rssEmail" name="email" />

and above this line:

<input type="submit" class="rssSubmit" value="Subscribe" />

Ok, we’re half way there. No, I’m joking. That’s all. You’ve implemented the form and it should be fully functional and looking pretty much like the one I’ve used to exemplify this tutorial.

Save the lsidebar.php file and upload it to your FTP server.

The End Result

Your code should look similar to mine (except for the feed name mentioned in two places):

<h2>Subscribe by Email</h2>
<ul>
	<li class="rssForm">
		<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"
		action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post"
		target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/
		fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,
		height=520');return true">
			<input type="text" class="rssEmail" name="email" />
			<input type="submit" class="rssSubmit" value="Subscribe" />
			<input type="hidden" value="Blogsessive" name="uri"/>
			<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>
		</form>
		<small>We take privacy seriously.<br />
		Your email address will <strong>not</strong> be shared.</small>
	</li>
</ul>

Now, you’ll be able to provide your readers with a functional email subscription based on FeedBurner’s code, but looking like the one designed for your free WordPress theme of choice: Simple Balance 2.0.

Any questions on this tutorial? I’d be happy to answer you in the comments section.

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Here it is folks, Simple Balance 2.0 – a free, simple WordPress theme with enough options to make it “premium-like”.

After launching the first version (1.0) in July, I’ve decided that the next release should not be an intermediary version, but rather a real, meaningful update. And that’s how Simple Balance 2.0 was born.

Simple Balance 2.0 is launched under a new slogan: “More Power. More Style. Your Style!” Why? Because that’s what it has to offer! More control over it’s options, advertising space, layout and color, and with each future update you’ll be able to tweak it more and more to your own style!

Let’s take a look at what Simple Balance 2.0 has to offer

Many new options have been added, most of which you can adjust through the theme’s brand new “Control Panel”.

• An extensive and inclusive theme control panel;
• Widget-ready sidebars;
• Top advertising space (468×60 pixels);
• Sidebar advertising space: Up to 8 small square banners (125×125 pixels);
• Individual settings for each banner you add:
  1. Custom banner URL;
  2. Do Follow / No Follow witch;
  3. Title and alternate text;
  4. Open in a new window or same window
• Master switch (on/off) for every Ad Zone;
• Variable layout structure:
  1. Centered content;
  2. Right-aligned content;
• 5 new additional color schemes (more released monthly);
• Option to display the default left sidebar image, use a custom one or hide it;
• Custom feed URL;
• Valid cross-browser tested XHTML and CSS;
• SEO smart coding;
• Works with WordPress 2.6.2 (tested starting with WordPress 2.5);
• Any many more options that I’ll let you discover.

Downloads, Preview and Updates

The Simple Balance 2.0 Control Panel

To adjust the settings closer to your needs, Simple Balance 2.0 comes with a clean, informative control panel that becomes available under the “Design” tab as soon as you activate the theme. Here’s a screenshot of the control panel:

Introducing “Color Schemes” and “Layout Positioning”

Different people have different design tastes, so, with Simple Balance 2.0 you have more control over the design, by being able to switch the content area position and to use either the default color scheme or one of the five new additional color themes:

• Silver Red – For a corporate look;
• Olive Green – For a more sober, yet colorful look;
• Red Orange – For the fresh people;
• Lucky Star – For your teenage girl diary;
• Green Life – For followers of the “Green Way of Life”.

Here’s a small preview of each of the above color schemes:

A free, premium-like WordPress Theme

That’s Simple Balance 2.0! That’s my gift to Blogsessive’s loyal readers, followers and friends with a kind thanks for all we’ve been through, together in these wonderful 7 months that have passed since Blogsessive was born!

Remember to sign up for free to Blogsessive’s RSS feed to find out about new updates, as soon as they become available!

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Yesterday I promised I’d tell you what I’ve been working on lately. Well, Simple Balance version 2.0 has just got out of development stage and for today will be in a testing stage across a few WordPress versions. If all goes well, tomorrow you’ll be able to download it and take it for a test drive. For now, version 1.0 is still available for downloads.

And because I’m convinced that good quality can still be delivered for free sometimes, this new version of Simple Balance gives you just about enough control of its settings, but don’t take my word for it. See for yourself in the following screenshots.

Simple Balance Control Panel

A huge step from version 1.0 to version 2.0. The control panel allows design settings, some SEO features, 2 positioning variations (center-aligned content or left-aligned content), color schemes (5 fresh additional color schemes), custom RSS link, individual ad settings and many many more options that will basically transform Simple Balance just the way you like.

Color Schemes – We all love color diversity!

Take a look at the following screenshots. These are variations based on the 3 of the 5 additional color schemes that Simple Balance 2.0 has built in and also some layout positioning settings. Additional color schemes (easy to install) will be released each month!

“Olive Green” Color Scheme

“Red Orange” Color Scheme

“Silver Red” Color Scheme

So, who said that premium-like quality can’t be found for free? Just remember to subscribe to the RSS feed to receive all the updates as soon as they get published.

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Update

Simple Balance theme is a 3 column widget-ready WordPress theme. Some of the features include:

1. Widget-ready left and right sidebars;
2. Top 468×60 ad space;
3. Right sidebar built-in ad space for 125×125 banners;
4. SEO smart coding for titles and content;
5. WordPress 2.5 ready;
6. Valid cross-browser tested XHTML and CSS;
7. Possibility to fully display the latest X posts on homepage instead of the post excerpt (to prevent duplicate content issues);
8. Not to forget, beautifully balanced design;

Since this is version 1.0 expect some changes in future versions to make this theme even more appealing. Suggestions are kindly appreciated.

Enjoy the Simple Balance theme!

Preview and download

You can preview the Simple Balance 2.0 theme on this demo server.

More info on this theme is available here.

If you use and enjoy this theme, you could consider a PayPal donation of your choice:

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As you might have noticed, the past week was a bit more quiet on Blogsessive, but before I get to the reason behind that, let me tell you some things about me and Blogsessive.

For a blog, I always thought that there are a few critical steps that can shape its future. In my case, Blogsessive took these steps successfully.

1. Blogsessive has passed the first three months of existence;
2. Blogsessive has gathered over 100 RSS subscribers and Twitter followers;
3. And most important, a wonderful community began to grow around this blog.

None of these steps would have been possible without you, Blogsessive’s loyal readers. For that, I sincerilly thank you!

As I’ve shared with you in a previous post, I believe that blogging’s biggest value resides in its education capabilities. So, during the past (almost) four months, I’ve learned many new things, along with you and from your comments.

Those of you that read the about page, know that I have a background in web design and development and what better way to repay you for all your help and loyalty than by putting those skills at work, as I’ve done when building this blog’s design from scratch.

Simple Balance WordPress Theme

Update: Simple Balance free WordPress theme has been released.

Soon (most probably this weekend), I’ll make available for download a free theme that I’ve worked on lately, called “Simple Balance”. There are still things that need more work at a coding level, but I can definitely give you a preview of the theme:

Again, thank you for visiting and being active on Blogsessive!

Alex

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