Introduction

Charcoal is my pride and joy. My first design made from scratch starting with Photoshop and ending with A fully functional Habari theme. Initial version was released for Habari 0.4 on March 12, 2008 and after 2 updates and a month and a half later, I had the privilege to witness it being chosen and committed as one of Habari's bundled system themes.

The design is aimed for elegance and balance. The idea was to make a design which help site visitors focus on content without the need for the excess white area and over-simplicity. As this my first, and amongst my few designs, there is still a big chance for improvements. If you have any ideas or if you notice any bugs, please help by logging in a ticket in Habari Trac.

Download and Installation

As of Habari 0.5, Charcoal is included with the standard Habari package. After installing Habari, just login to the admin site and activate the theme form the 'Themes' page.

Screenshots

Charcoal Home Page Charcoal Multiple posts Charcoal Single Post

Configuration

The upcoming version of Habari, 0.7, is going to introduce much imporovements to theming including theme options. Until then, Charcoal can be configured by editing some constants within its theme.php file.

Different theme options are controlled by the values of constants defined in the beginning of the file:

  • SHOW_TITLE_IMAGE : Set to 'true' to display your own title image, an image with the name title.png must be present in the theme's 'images' directory.
  • HOME_LABEL : Set to whatever you want your first tab text to be.
  • SHOW_ENTRY_PAPERCLIP : Setting this to true will show the paper clip graphic in entries, set to 'false' to hide it.
  • SHOW_PAGE_PAPERCLIP : Setting this to true will show the paper clip graphic in pages, set to 'false' to hide it.
  • SHOW_POWERED : Set to 'true' to display the "Powered by Habari" graphic, and to 'false' to hide it.
  • DISPLAY_LOGIN : Set to 'true' to display the login/admin link in the navigation bar, and to false to hide it.
  • TAGS_IN_MULTIPLE : Set to true, to display post tags for each post displayed in the 'Multiple' views (ie, search results, tag views and navigation pages).

Recommended Plugins

Charcoal won't need any particular plugin in order to function. It also comes with a simple "Tag Cloud" functionality. For a more customizable tag cloud, you might want to consider using the RN Tag Cloud plugin. The theme will "recognize" it when it is activated, so there is no need to add anything to the theme templates.

Compatibility

Like the reset of Habari, Charcoal is still under development and my not display correctly on some browsers. It was successfully tested on Firefox 2 & 3, Safari 3 & 4, Google Chrome and Internet explorer 8, 7 & 6. If you test with any other browser please let me know if you find any issues.

Acknowledgment

I would have never been able to progress with this little project without the support of the Habari community. Almost everyone there helped me by either by answering a code question, suggesting an implementation or even giving their opinions and support. Thanks guys!

License

Charcoal is included with Habari and like Habari, it is licensed under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0.