LifeStreaming White: A Free LifeStream Wordpress Theme
I am proud to present to you the free lifestreaming wordpress theme: LifeStreaming White. I know, not a very creative name, but hey it’s free! This theme utilizes jQuery to display recent updates in a horizontal scrolling fashion, kind of like a timeline. You can watch your life go by, and scroll through your updates! Without further ado, here is LifeStreaming White.
Demo: http://designs.project66.net/
Download: LifeStreaming White
Screenshot:
Install Instructions
- Download the LifeStream plugin by David Cramer:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/ - Upload plugin & activate.
Click the LifeStream Tab -> Settings -> Check ‘Post a daily summary of my lifestream’
(This will save your previous day as a post, and allow users to comment on it)
-If you don’t want a link to Daves site, uncheck “Show Credits” - Click LifeStream Tab -> Feeds, and then chose the feeds you wish to add. After you add your feeds, check all the feeds and click “Refresh”. This will grab the latest data.
- Download the WP Page Numbers plugin by Jens Tornell:
http://www.jenst.se/2008/03/29/wp-page-numbers
Upload & Activate - Upload Theme & Activate
Go Settings -> Page Numbers -> Uncheck ‘Use Themes?’ -> Update Settings
Theme Settings
- Use Widgets For This Theme!! Put archives widget at the very top. Design -> Widgets -> Add Archives, drag it on top of other widgets. DON’T use the lifestream widget.
- Show A Maximum of 14 posts (Admin->Settings->Reading), then default 10 is fine.
- Use the “read more” link in your posts, instead of showing the entire post. To do this, when you write a post push “Alt+Shift+T” or in the HTML view type <!–more–> where you want to cut off the article.
Known Issues
- Youtube feed doesn’t work. Work around: use the generic rss feed, and add in the Youtube feed url.
- Flickr feed doesn’t work. Possible work around: use the generic rss feed, and add in the Flickr feed url (not yet tested).
- HTML doesn’t validate. The theme validates, its the lifestream plugin that has invalid markup. To fix this, edit plugins/lifestream/_lifestream.php. Change line 765 to:
return sprintf('%s<div class="lifestream_events">%s</div>', $label, $rows[0]);. Now edit plugins/lifestream/pages/lifestream-table.inc.php, change line 36 to:<?php echo str_replace("\n", "", $result->render($_)); ?>. If your site still doesn’t validate, you need to edit previous posts (by lifestream) and remove the the line break after </a>. – wordpress adds in a ending p tag for some reason.
Wow, this is great! Thanks!
This looks like one of the coolest themes for a long time. Bit confused about the page numbers at the bottom though. Are they only relevant to it when using the lifestream plugin and can I use this theme without using the lifstream plugin? Also if there is only one post per category or per month in the archive then nothing displays at all when clicked. Can you help out?
Oh yes and is it possible to have next and previous links below the individual post pages?
Regards,
Peter.
Man, this is an awesome theme! Very cool, very original, love the jQuery, all around – awesome.
One of the few quality themes incorporating lifestreaming. Very cool. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the positive feedback! Peter, you can use without the lifestream plugin – completely optional. As for the 1 page per category, it was most likely a looping issue which is now resolved. To fix, redownload the theme and overwrite the file: posts_slider.php in the lifestreaming.white directory. To add previous and next links, modify the file single.php. Find:
<p class="postmetadata">And above it add:
<div class="navigation">
<div class="left"><?php previous_post_link('« %link') ?></div>
<div class="right"><?php next_post_link('%link »') ?></div>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>
In style.css replace
a.more-link {witha.more-link, .post div.navigation a {and if you want to add some padding around the links add:.post div.navigation {margin: 10px 0;
}
Hope this helps!
This is excellent. Works a charm now. I have a few tweaks I would like to have a go at myself but one more thing… could you possibly advise on a way to change the category links along the top by the blog title to page links instead? Perhaps I may put a title banner up there too. Many thanks in advance.
Peter.
Oh, and if you copy and paste the above code it only seems to work when changing the italics on all the quotes to normal case.
To make the categories loop pages instead…
In header.php find:
<?php wp_list_categories('title_li= &order=ASC'); ?>Change it to:
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li= &sort_order=ASC'); ?>As for the italic qoutes, that is supposed to be non-italic quotes. Not sure why wordpress changed it.
I love the theme, but how do you make it display a different size picture on the homepage to the picture used in the actual post?
Thanks again. Ill carry on twiddeling with the design and let you know how it goes.
Thanks! Sam to fix the stretched image on the homepage, you have to make sure you don’t specify the image height. To fix this, edit that post, go into the code view and in the tag remove height=”600″. It should fix the stretched height, if not let me know!
Peter, one thing I recommend you do is add some padding around the sharethis plugin to add a little spacing below it on the homepage. If you use custom code to display this plugin, it should be fairly easy, if you use the auto insert functionality then you’ll have to use the template code instead. Let me know if you need help with this.
Hi Juno,
That worked really well. Thanks again I love the way this theme works.
Cheers
Have you pulled this theme for download or is it available from elsewhere.
Or are you just updating:)
The download link goes to a 404.
Cheers
Fixed now! Wordpress 2.7 upgrade screwed up my download link. Try again
Thank you, sir!
hello, I would like to know more about how to move right categories, because they overlap on the logo that I inserted in the head, thanhs
sorry for my bad english
Piero, I think your problem is you have to many categories at the top? Or maybe your logo is to wide so it overlaps the first category. If you post your url I can see. If that is the case, I would find the in the style.css:
.blog_title {And increase
padding-right: 40px;to80pxor whatever you need. If the problem is you have to many categories, you should a) exclude the some categories from the top or b) use wp_list_pages() at instead (if you have less pages). You could then just stick the categories as a widget on the sidebar. Let me know if I can further assist you.thanks for all
Hello.
Can’t get the wp-page-numbers work with your theme. When I look att he index.php it seems like you already prepared it for Page numbers, so what can possibly be wrong?
You need to make sure you have the plugin installed and activated.
Hello.
I loved the theme, it was just what I was looking for. I was wondering if it’s possible to show only one post at a time instead of two in the slider. Thanks!
Thanks! Yes its quite possible and I’ve had people also looking to do 3 posts at a time. I don’t have the time quite yet to do it for you but if you know a little javascript and css you might be able to figure it out. You have edit the posts_javascript.php and style.css file. You’ll need to change the width of each li element in the css, and then adjust the width accordingly in posts_javascript.php file.
Thanks a lot! I was trying to make it display only one post via css but it was not working. Now it is and I’m currently using your theme on my blog. I customized it a bit (but kept your credits on footer) and added a function to limit the words in posts, so I don’t have to remember to use the *more* tag everytime. Thanks again, I love this theme!
Hi
I was looking for a lifestream-based theme, and I thought yours was the most beautiful. but getting up a trial version, i noticed it’s breaking badly (everything is out of the box so far– i have not attempted to change a thing.) Any thoughts on what’s amiss? I’ve been blogging since early 2000, maybe I just have too much content? http://www.2009.eleganthack.com/
Thanks Christina! Yes, your problem is that your blog has to many categories and to many archived links on the right hand nav, so it distorts this theme from its intended design. One solution I would recommend is to use a sitemap instead of the archived links widget, and maybe use a categories widget instead in place of that. Also if you go into the header.php file, where you have wp_list_categories() you can specify category id’s to limit the amount being output, or change it to wp_list_pages() instead, if you would rather show pages. As for the sitemap, check out sitemap plugin by dagon design: http://www.dagondesign.com/sitemap/ – this is what I use on this blog.
Thank you for a great free theme! i am using it on my personal site and love it. i think it makes me look very professional but not as stuffy
cant wait for the improved version to come out.
all the best!
Thanks for the feed back! I have been insanely busy with work over the past month so I haven’t even gotten around to posting a blog update, let a lone upgrade this theme. I hope to over the next few weeks. Check back then
oops… if that last comment did post, please take it down. I see I forgot the second half of your advice.
No worries
It might help those who also have the similar problem.
hi
firstly thanks for your theme – i like it a lot! I have a problem though – for some reason once I start posting the menu bar moves from the right side to the bottom. Am i doing something wrong?
Any help is appreciated! Especially as it seems you’re responding here in your own time
Dan
AHA – solved! thanks anyway!
I’m trying to incorporate your slider & lifestream functionality into my site which uses a modified Hemingway theme. The only posts which will use the slider will be the lifestream posts. I’m not sure how to achieve this. Any ideas?
Thanks.
I should have mentioned I’m using Wordpress 2.7.
It should work fine in 2.7. First off, you need to have a good understanding of javascript & jquery, as well as some php, html, and css. Off the top of my head, the way to accomplish this would be:
1) Create a lifestream category and setup the plugin to post to this category
2) Disclude the lifestream updates from the homepage (unless you want them to be shown)
3) Use an if statement on your category view template (default is index.php), ie:
< ?php
if (is_category('lifestream cat')) {
include('posts_slider.php'); //copied from lifestreaming white template
} else {
include('posts.php'); //would be your standard loop to show posts
}
?>
You’ll have to copy large sections of the css portion which deals with the slider, and make sure to include the proper js files in the header. If you want to optimize your template so that the js and css is ONLY included on the lifestream page, use the same if statement in the header:
< ?php if (is_category('lifestream cat')) : ?>
//js & css
< ?php endif; ?>
Hope you can figure it out, if not post a url and I’ll see if I can help. Cheers!
btw wordpress an anoying space between < and ?php so you’ll get a parse error if you dont fix that
Thank you – I’ve been on the right track, these extra tips will help!
paris
Hi Paris,
If you happen to read this, do tell us what your website is. I’d love to see an integration between Hemingway and LifeStream.
I’ve got this successfully set up and working on my DEV site and I’m pleased with the results. One more question though: my site is a fluid layout and I’d prefer to retain that functionality throughout. However, it looks like the posts_javascript.php code requires that widths be specified in pixels in order to work properly. Is that correct?
paris
Yup thats correct – but with jQuery you can get the width of any object in pixels even if its fluid layout. You can also add a listener to get the pixel width on resize. It would be a little tricky to get this working though
That’s way beyond my abilities! Thanks for your help.
No prob. It would probably be a little laggy and slow even if you could figure it out. Post a demo when you got something up
Here’s our site with your modified lifestream theme for our Community category:
http://www.openlooppress.org/category/community/
Seems like there’s a bug with the lifestream plugin dates. I had to remove reference to the small date, when it posted it would always show as 11/31/1999.
Thanks for your help in getting this to work for our site.
Any chance your slider script is / will be available as a separate download / demo kind of thing?
wow
first of all thanks for this nice theme.
and second: i was not able to get lightbox 2 working properly in this theme on http://ferrie.maaswinkel.nl/.
i assume that there is a ajax conflict going on.
if i was able to fix it this was a complete other response but i’m not.
would you be so kind to spend some time on this conflict?
Should see some of the boners they pull when discussing econ. ,
Hi, excellent template that I would very much like to use on my new wordpress site that I am setting up. Would like to know, do you still offer support for this template, and is it also possible to make a small donation for your effort with designing this template?
Hi Tommy, I can assist you on setting this up if you still need. Click my name to send me an email. Cheers
Hmm one thing I found out is that Gravatar on this theme does not work for some reason.
I can see my gravatar in admin menu but when I post a comment, it does not show up anywhere… Just default Mystery Man shows up.
Please help! & Thanks.
Currently the theme does not support gravatars. I may implement this at a later date when I release a newer version.