Introduction

Started with an intention of a redesign, I wanted to have more focus on typography and white space on my site. As I worked on Dark Autumn, I found that it had the potential to be a theme for Habari users to enjoy rather than just another skin for the box. Adding the silhouettes came later as I grew more fascinated by the thought of biking through and about the many parks in the beautiful city of Melbourne. I Heart Vectors had great free vectors that I just couldn't resist and ended up using in the design.

Features

  • Two columns and a "footerbar": In addition to the sidebar, you can add more "plugins output" to the dark footer bar. Future version should have separately configurable footer bars for entry and pages than the one in the homepage or the search results.
  • Integrated Sidenotes support (a.k.a Asides): Just like Mzingi, Dark Autumn comes with support for asides. All you need to do is to tag your post with "aside", and that post will be excluded from the main post display and displayed in your sidebar ( The "aside" tag is configurable in the theme settings - See the "Configuration" section for more details).
  • Configurable: You can configure the main colors, images, and some of the textual content of Dark Autumn using the theme settings. Refere to the Configuration section for more details on possible customizations.
  • Customized plugin support: The theme ships with a customized templates for both of Twitter and Blogroll plugins. It also includes the necessary "calls" for the RN Tagcloud, Maintenance Mode and the Colophon plugins. So the only thing you need to do is to activate these plugins, and they will work. Nothing is needed to be added to your sidebar/footerbar.

Download

Current version is 1.1 and is only compatible with Habari 0.6 and later. Use the links below to download the latest version of Dark Autumn and the Photoshop source file (coming soon).

VERSION 1.1

SOURCE (PSD)

Installation

  • Extract the downloaded archive in the /user/themes/ directory of your Habari installation.
  • Login to your blog's admin site and activate Dark Autumn from within the 'Themes' page.

Screenshots

  

Configuration

After installing the theme, you will be able to see a "Settings" button. Clicking on that will open up the theme configration form. In there you can configure the following:

  • Theme colors: You can change how the theme look like by changing the colors. Configurable colors include banner color, links color, links hover color and background color.
  • Images: You can disable any of the built-in silhouette images, and you can also set a background image for the upper banner by proving a full url to the that image.
  • Textual: In the Textual section you can set your Asides tag to whatever you want, change the text for the Feed link in the site main navigation, Maintenance mode page page title and also the blurb text that is displayed right below your site title.

Compatibility

Dark Autumn 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. It was not and will never be tested for Internet Explorer 6. But if you test with any other browser please let me know if you find any issues.

Changelog

  • Version 1.0-beta - Initial release
  • Version 1.0 - Added compatibility with Habari 0.5.x
  • Version 1.1 - Added compatibility with Habari 0.6

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to Stefan Petre for writing the free ColorPicker jquery plugin and to IHeartVector for their free vectors.

A big thanks to Matt for his help with the footerbar, Chris and Michael for answering my CSS questions. And a big thanks to the rest of the Habari community for giving away their opinions as well as their encouragements.

License

Dark Autumn is licensed under the terms of Apache Software license 2.0. This means that you can freely redistribute and or modify and release the theme. As long as you attribute the author within the "source code".

If you like the theme, I kindly ask you to keep the link backs in the footer. This is not mandatory though.

Bugs? Questions? General comments?

Please write something in the comment box below. Make sure you mention your Habari and Dark Autumn versions. Alternatively, you can always drop me a line through the contact page.