Features Of the Upcoming «Times Racer» WordPress Theme

Posted on November 8th • Under: Design Suggetions

Times Racer is a WordPress theme which you can currently see on this blog. I have always thought that sans-serif typefaces (like Helvetica, Arial or Verdana) are the best for readability on the screen. However the increasing use of font anti-aliasing among different operating systems can be a good reason to reevaluate this assumption.

Breaking the rules that were once considered the only reasonable way of doing something is very hard, especially for designers. But it is also very mind-opening at the same time — to realize the unbounded beauty of the design choices and opportunities.

Summary of the planned features of the Times Racer:

Different sidebar widget layout for the front page, individual articles, pages and the archives section in order to increase the usability by showing only the relevant information.
Fluid layout (using Konstruktors CSS snippets) with percentages as a measure of width. Resizable text set in relative em values. Only one theme color which can be easily changed to accommodate your personal taste and needs.
Ability to specify page titles that are different from the corresponding menu (page list) item (good for SEO; oh, I hate this word).
Default image alignment without a need to add any CSS classnames. Additional set of easy to remember styles for:
- positioning the images (left, right, full width);
- aligning blocks and columns of the text inside an article, for example quotes and their source, important notices;
- creating “flat” lists like this one which have more content per each item and can be nicely aligned with to the rest of the paragraphs.
PNG image transparency enabled by default for all images (using the solution provided by Bob Osola) for the users of Internet Explorer.

All of the features mentioned above will work out of the box and won’t require any plugins to be installed.

Lets make it even better

What are the features that you would like to see implemented into this theme? If you have any suggestions, please add them into comments.

22 Responses

nahnu

Nov 10 at 14:22

hi there, Times Racer will be an amazing theme, i hope :)

maybe you will add some mouse over tricks for post tags, as seen on http://techblog.pl/

additionally, if there is some AJAX things (live comments, live search etc as like as K2- http://getk2.com) & if there is quictags for comments i will be very happy.

Kaspars

Nov 10 at 14:57

Hello Nahnu, thank you very much for the suggestions!

1. I think that such mouse over tricks are a little bit too complicated for displaying categories and tags. After reading one post users often like to see tags associated with it and immediately click on the one that interests them. Therefore hiding those links would require an extra action from the user, and that doesn’t encourage to browse and click intuitively.

2. Live comment preview is a very good idea because of the jQuery library that is included in WP default installation.

3. I’ll look at the ways to use parts of quicktag feature that is already available in WP editorial panel.

nahnu

Nov 10 at 15:15

Kaspars, here two more suggestions ;)

- inbuilt asides support, (maybe with easy asides: http://www.remotesensingtools......wordpress/)

- inbuilt gravatar support

also, after i’m happy to give translating support for turkish. i like this theme :)

Kaspars

Nov 10 at 15:39

Nahnu,

1. Observer was meant to be the same as Asides but using the built-in blogroll. Such implementation has very many disadvantages — no permalinks, comments, content formating or even linking inside item.

Therefore I will definitely figure out a solution to enable Asides as separate blog entries and not limited to links only.

2. I will add gravatar support.

3. Thank you for your interest in translating this theme. That would be very great to have it in as many languages as possible. I will try to use WP built-in functions that make translating very easy.

nahnu

Nov 10 at 15:43

by the way, is there any possible relase date?

Kaspars

Nov 10 at 15:45

#10

I will be working on it next week, therefore the following weekend could be a good estimate.

nahnu

Nov 12 at 12:46

#11

previewed comment! very nice :) but imho, “red” is pretty good color.

Kaspars

Nov 12 at 13:04

#12

Nahnu, for comment preview I found an excellent plugin called Filosofo Comments Preview by Austin Matzko. It requires no customization and it uses the default comment style while previewing. Therefore I will suggest everyone who wants such a feature to use it, and will not include it by default.

Regarding the color - I simply wanted something different today, and it is very easily done by changing only one color code at the beginning of the CSS file.

nahnu

Nov 12 at 13:15

#13

Kaspars, when i saw this color i remember your “opera house” :)

Doug

Nov 12 at 15:10

#14

Hi, I don’t really have any suggestions, just wanted to say how excellent this theme and its code look. I look forward to its release. Keep up the good work.

Kaspars

Nov 12 at 15:29

#15

Hola, Doug, thank you very much. Your Memoria futura looks really amazing - too bad I don’t know Spanish, although my little sense of Portuguese helps out a bit.

nahnu

Nov 13 at 16:22

#16

some of the wordpress users love smilies (in wp-includes folder), therefore for a perfect wordpress theme they must have style.

i have already start to play with “sans serif racer” for my blog :)

Kaspars

Nov 13 at 21:21

#17

Nahnu, thank you for letting me know that, because I usually don’t use smilies and therefore didn’t think about them.

Great to see that you are making a good use of sans-serif & times racer themes :)

Dubhaltach

Nov 15 at 2:57

#19

One thing I would like is two column versions of these themes. I’m playing a little with the CSS (local machine so no URI) and very much like how you’ve done things. We have a particular requirement for very wide graphics. Hence the two column request. Please keep up the good work and thanks for making these available.

Dubhaltach

Nov 15 at 3:04

#20

Oops! That should have read:

One thing I like is ….

Kaspars D.

Nov 15 at 4:43

#21

Hello, Dubhaltach. Both themes are in fact using two columns already, but as the archive links and category names are usually too wide for a single sidebar column, I did put them into additional two columns. I will post a tutorial in the wiki to illustrate how you can very easily make a custom two column version (with a wider main column) without any additional CSS code.

And I am really glad that you find these themes useful.

nahnu

Nov 24 at 3:16

#32

hi Kaspars,

comments has terrible looking with ie7, they look mixed with the post.

and, 2nd sidebar is very nice place for google ad :)

Kaspars

Nov 24 at 4:16

#33

Nahnu, thank you for letting me know about the ie7, as I don’t use IE on regular bases. I think it is all about clearing the post div, but I’ll see and try to fix it.

Regarding the ads, do you think it is a bad place? I think that most of the web developers (possibly my target audience) use firefox and have either adblock extension or they are simply immune to the ads.

nahnu

Nov 24 at 22:20

#34

i think the 2nd sidebar very good place for ads and similar stuff, i like it. it seems good.

nahnu

Nov 27 at 3:48

#37

Ads section is broken with safari browser.

deuts

Jun 16 at 7:03

#6050