In case I changed the theme again, this is the 'new' look.

A few months ago my site received a much needed overhaul. I updated the structure and looks and went crazy on Googly Web 2.0 mark-up stuff. Considering I am not a webdesigner, I am quite pleased with the result.

There are probably many more non-designers like me, also looking to build their own personalised WordPress site, so I thought I’d share my experiences. This post is aimed at amateurs who want to give their personal site an own look without too much hassle.

Don’t start from scratch

The previous theme was written entirely from scratch, using a few pieces of code copied from the default TwentyTen theme. What I learned from that enterprise is that it is very hard to do everything yourself, if you’re not a professional. Many rough ends will make your theme look less tidy and your lack of skill results in a theme that is harder to navigate and read.

So, I decided to go with an often forgotten feature of WordPress theme development: child themes. The TwentyTen is a very solid base to build upon, the way it presents texts is very easy on the eyes. By using a good theme as a starting point for your child theme, you have all its advantages. Because you’re creating a child theme and not forking TwentyTen directly, updates to the original theme will automatically benefit your theme as well.

The simple start

The only file you really need is the CSS file. Create a new directory with the slug name of your theme in wp-content/themes/ and add an empty file to it named style.css. I added the following header:

/*
Theme Name: seh
Theme URI: http: //www.sensehofstede.nl/
Description: Theme for SenseHofstede.nl, child theme of Twenty Ten
Author: Sense Hofstede
Author URI: http: //www.sensehofstede.nl/about/
Template: twentyten
Version: 0.1.0
Tags: blue, white, threaded-comments, translation-ready, microformats,
custom-menu
*/

@import url("../twentyten/style.css");

With a stylesheet containing just these few lines of code, you’ve already got a working theme. It does look quite similar to TwentyTen though. But now you can start working on adapting the style. Make sure that you place all your own CSS after the @import rule, so you will override existing entries in the stylesheet of TwentyTen!

If you only want to make a few adjustments, just adding the stylesheet will do the trick. Maybe all you want are a different font and some changes to the default colour palette. If you want more, however, you will have to add PHP files.

WordPress processes child themes like this: it first looks for files in the child theme’s directory, then in the directory of its parent theme. When you don’t create a custom header.php, your theme will continue to use the TwentyTen header. This rule, however, does not apply to the important functions.php file. Every file with that name present in both the child and parent theme will be loaded, the child theme’s first. This behaviour gives you a very powerful to adapt important parts of the theme without having to create new template files.

Playing with functions

If you look to the top of this blog post you will see that underneath the title the date and time this post was published are shown. The function responsible for this is defined in a specific way that allows overriding.

if ( ! function_exists( 'twentyten_posted_on' ) ) :
function twentyten_posted_on() {
    STUFF
}
endif;

If you write your own twentyten_posted_on() function in your child theme’s function.php, TwentyTen will not try to define it again, but instead use yours. You can change more parts of the theme without having to create your own template files.

Template files

But if you want to do more, you will have to dive deeper in the code. I wanted to change my header a lot from what TwentyTen offers, so I created my own header.php file and used that. As soon as I placed it in the child theme’s directory, it replaced the default header. This can be done to replace all PHP files you find in the parent theme’s directory.

Interesting template files you could consider replacing, are loop.php and loop-single.php, which are used everywhere to display a post or lists of posts and searchform.php, which is used to display the search form when available.

Here another advantage of child themes becomes clear: you can create template files for the most common pages and leave the rarely used ones to the parent theme. Also, if WordPress decides to add a new page, your theme will automatically support it as soon as the update arrives.

Important to notice

There are some things to keep in mind while working on the child theme. By default you would use bloginfo(‘template_directory’); to print the base path when embedding images. But when you want to use images in the directory of the child theme, you will have to use bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); instead.

I wrote this post for the TwentyTen theme, but since then TwentyEleven has been published. Although it probably works just as well for the greatest part, there might be some minor differences. Also check the new template files like content-*.php.

You use Benjamin Dobell’s Heimdall. It does not only work on Linux, Mac and Windows, but it is also open source. The code is available from GitHub.

Howto

When you want to install a custom MOD like CyanogenMod or MIUI, you need to have the ClockwordMod ROM Manager to install. That requires a rooted kernel anyway, so whether you just want to root your phone or do more, the initial steps are the same.

First you need to pick a rooted kernel. The XDA Developers forum forum for the I9100 is a good place to look. I always use the CF-Root kernel. It already includes ClockwordMod, so you don’t have to install that from the Android Market. Download the kernel here.

Download Heimdall from here and install it. There are *.debs available. If you wish, you can use the frontend, but I have found the command line interface (CLI) to be more reliable.

Unpack the previously download kernel: you will end up with a file named ‘zImage’. That is your kernel.

Shut down your phone. Now start it in download mode by holding the home, volume down and power buttons down at the same time. Press volume up to confirm and connect your phone to your PC with its USB cable. Realise that your (extended) warranty is void once you’ve flashed.

Open your terminal of choice and navigate to the directory you unpacked the kernel image in.

Execute this command:

sudo heimdall flash --kernel zImage

After it is done, your phone will automatically reboot. Congratulations, your phone is now rooted!

If you want to use a custom ROM, now place the downloaded ROM archive on the phone’s storage, shut the phone down and launch it in recovery mode by pressing volume up and the home button during boot. Choose the ‘install from sd card’ option. Make sure you delete the Dalvik cache and user data before restarting, or your phone will be stuck in an endless boot loop!

Restore

If you want to restore your phone to its original state, you need the official firmware and a backup of your data you naturally made before starting. On the XDA Developers forum, a great person maintains a thread with a collection of official firmware.

Unpack the download archive, open a terminal and navigate to the resulting directory. There execute this command:

sudo heimdall flash --kernel zImage --cache cache.img --factoryfs factoryfs.img --hidden hidden.img --modem modem.bin --param param.lfs

Make sure you delete the Dalvik cache and user data before restarting, or your phone will be stuck in an endless boot loop!

You should still keep in mind that Banshee does not have a DAAP server of its own. Its DAAP plugin can only consume shared music. One thing that may have been added since 1.4, though I’m not sure on this, is the possibility to connect to remote DAAP servers. Go to ‘Media->Add Remote DAAP Server’, enter the domain name or the IP address of the server, make sure the server port is correct, and press OK.

DAAP servers on your local network should be detected automatically. How do you set up such a server? In my post from 2008 I recommended Tangerine. However, apart from a fix to the menu shortcut in January this year, there has been no active development on it since August 2009. The project seems pretty dead.

However, the only other DAAP server I can find in the Software Centre on the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha release, is ‘mt-daapd’. Its description says it is part of the Firefly Media Server, but according to Wikipedia the latest release of that project comes from 2008. The website mentioned in the description does no longer exist.

What alternative do we have? It seems that we have none but to stick with Tangerine. On my system it worked, and I am running the Ubuntu 11.04 alpha, so new software versions don’t seem to have broken things.

Setting Tangerine up

My Tangerine settings

First install the ‘tangerine‘ package, either by searching for it in the Software Centre, or by looking the package up in Synaptic. Tangerine will automatically start when you log in, all you need to do is configure it properly. Launch ‘Tangerine Media Sharing’, either by searching for it in Unity’s Applications place, or from—if you’re using GNOME 2.x—’System->Preferences->Tangerine Media Sharing’, and set it up to take its songs from Banshee. You might want to compare your settings to mine on the right. The Tangerine service starts right away when you enable music sharing in the settings.

Banshee’s DAAP extension is enabled by default, so it should show up automatically as soon as Tangerine is started. However, it seems that currently it crashes/freezes when Tangerine is started while Banshee is running. Restart Banshee and everything will be fine. I have been able to share my music without any problems.

(Note: it seems that for now the MPRIS extension is causing problems for Banshee in Ubuntu 11.04 alpha. When playback won’t start, disable that extension, restart Banshee—since it will have frozen—and try again. This will break Sound Menu integration, though.)

Lean menu, slick icon!

It has been a while since I blogged about giving Transmission an Application Indicator. In that post I said I was also working on giving Banshee an Application Indicator, bug #518171. Since then we’ve decided to not provide the indicator in the Banshee.NotificationArea extension, the default tray icon in Lucid still. Instead I’ve moved the code I already had over to a separate extension that has become part of the Banshee Community Extensions. The Banshee Community Extensions project, or BCE, is a set of extensions that are not part of the Banshee core, but shipped separately. The entry-barrier for new extensions is lower — useful if you’re submitting yours just before the 1.6.0 release — and they are hosted at Gitorious, which makes cooperation a lot easier.

Bertrand Lorentz accepted my merge proposal at 27 March and was so kind to clean up the code a bit and since then the Banshee.AppIndicator extension has been available from the BCE code repository.

Using Banshee.AppIndicator on Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”

Thanks to the hard work of Chow Loong Jin Banshee.AppIndicator was one of the community extensions that got packaged in Debian and later synced by Ubuntu. If you want to use the Application Indicator for Banshee you first need to install the banshee-extension-appindicator package. Install ‘banshee-extension-appindicator’. At the moment there is a small packaging bug in banshee-extension-appindicator, it should depend on the libappindicator0-cil package, but it doesn’t. You can work around this issue by manually installing libappindciator0-cil.

Once you’ve installed you first need to disable the Banshee.NotificationArea extension. Go to Edit->Preferences–>Extensions, scroll down and untick the checkbox for the “Notification Area Icon” extension. Now scroll up again and enable “Application Indicator for Banshee”. Done!

We keep track of applications that need support for Indicator Application on Launchpad with the bug tag ‘indicator-application‘: the list of bugs against applications that need Indicator Application support. There are code snippets on the wiki page of Application Indicator but in this blog post for those who would like to use it in their application.

I recently added support for Indicator Application to Lernid, Bzr-Gtk and Transmission and am now working on getting it into Banshee. How do you help Ubuntu with adding support to existing applications? I’ll try to make that clear in this blog post.

#1. Find something to work on. That list of bugs against applications that need Indicator Application support is a great place to start looking. Don’t forget to mark a bug as ‘In Progress’ when you’re actively working on it!

#2. We’re adding support to an application that is most likely used on more places than just Ubuntu. Therefore you should keep in mind that not only enabling Indicator Application support should be easy, but also disabling it. This means you’ll have to do some Autotools magic in order to make sure libappindicator is present and it is wanted. At the AppIndicator wiki page there is an example autotools macro. This should be added to the ./configure.ac, which can mostly be found in the project’s source code root directory.You may have to adapt this in order to make it fit in the existing makefiles.
NOTICE: The previously mentioned autotools example was written with the programming language C in mind. When you’re writing in C# you can reuse the code, but please keep in mind that you should check for ‘appindicator-sharp-0.1′ rather than ‘appindicator-0.1′. The whole check isn’t necessary for Python.

#3. Now we can start writing the code. Finally! I’m afraid I have to disappoint you, because the code itself is the least work of the whole procedure. Again, there is a Porting Guide at the wiki page with examples for all supported languages. Those are pretty straightforward, so I won’t repeat them here, but if you still have questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Important is that you should use the previously defined autotools variable HAVE_APPINDICATOR (when programming in C) to allow the application to be compiled with a GtkStatusIcon as well, on other systems. You can do that like this:

#ifdef HAVE_APPINDICATOR
 #include <libappindicator/app-indicator.h>
#endif

(other code)

#ifdef HAVE_APPINDICATOR
(Indicator Application code here)
#else
(leave the old GtkStatusIcon code here)
#endif

#4. Now that the code and build macros have been written — and the configure script and the makefiles regenerated — and you’ve tested it (naturally), it’s time to submit your wonderful patch. Of course you do this on the bug report we’ve got in Launchpad, but we also would like you to forward the patch upstream. If there was not yet a bug report in the bug tracker of the application you ported, report one and link it to the Launchpad bug report. In the upstream bug report, leave a comment with your patch.

After that you’re done. Congratulations, you’ve helped with making the systray cleaner and prettier and more consistent. This makes us happy!

AdoptionStats generates a data list and constantly returns it in the same format and therefore the results can easily be manipulated by other scripts, e.g. for generating graphs.

Use

I’ve pushed to script to a Bazaar branch on Launchpad: lp:~qense/+junk/adoptionstats. If you haven’t done it yet, install Bazaar and download the code with the command “bzr branch lp:~qense/+junk/adoptionstats” .

The script depends on the package ‘python-launchpad-bugs’, execute the command “sudo apt-get install python-launchpadlib” python-launchpad-bugs or click here click here to install it if you haven’t installed it yet.
(now using python-launchpadlib, thanks to thekorn)

The usage is very simple, but make sure you’ve made the script executable — right-click->Properties->Permissions->check ‘Allow execution of this file’, or just “chmod +x ./adoptionstats” . For getting a report on the current status of the ‘nautilus’ source package you enter the command “./adoptionstats -p nautilus” in the directory you save the file. The result is like this:

2010-01-21 16:15 {'need_forwarding': 5, 'per_status': {'In Progress': 3, 'Confirmed': 0, 'Invalid': 2279, 'New': 34, 'Fix Committed': 1, 'Triaged': 583, 'Fix Released': 754, 'Incomplete': 158, "Won't Fix": 16}}

Since the application uses optparse you can get the help text with “./adoptionstats -h”, but the only other option next to ‘-p’ and ‘-h’ is ‘-v’, which enables the printing of debug-level messages to your commandline.

It’s a shame that they didn’t decide to package it themselves. Eclipse is a good and often-used IDE and I think it should be included in the repositories. We don’t have to use Debian for all packages, do we?

Fortunately there is a PPA that offers 3.4, maintained by the Eclipse Team. The PPA can be found at https://launchpad.net/~eclipse-team/+archive/ppa. Unfortunately — there we go again — the amd64 build for jaunty failed. It’s still possible to get it working. Here’s how:

Using the PPA, no ‘Software Updates’ can be installed

People using 32bit can just use the provided PPA without any problems. If you are a 64bit user you’ll have to an earlier, successful build: in this case intrepid. Everything will work just fine.

So, for 32bit use this:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/eclipse-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

and for 64bit use this:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/eclipse-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Add this line to source.list with an text-editor or use System->Administration->Software Sources.

Now add the PPA’s key to your keyring using:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 5126890CDCC7AFE0

Run the usual command: sudo apt-get update and you can install Eclipse like you usually install programs. However, the Software Updates functionality won’t work.

Using the eclipse.org download, with plugins

You thought this would be the easy way? I’ll have to disappoint you. When I tried to use the official download I ran into some problems that could only be solved by installing the latest — 3.4 — version of Eclipse. So, yes, you’ll have to go to the previous part and follow those instructions too. Install Eclipse and go to Eclipse.org and download the latest version of Eclipse, pick your flavour.

In the archive you’ll find a compiled Eclipse, which can be executed right away. The plugin/Software Updates functionality works.

However, you will have to use Sun’s distribution of Java. Install sun-java6-bin and make it default by executing the command sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun.

UPDATE: Good news! Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’ has got Eclipse 3.5 in the repositories, you can now just install it from the package manager.

Banshee has always had a dedicated group of fans. In the discussions about Intrepid Ibex there were a lot of people proposing to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee. I had a quick look at Banshee at that time and wasn’t that impressed with what I saw.
Maybe I was too much used to Rhythmbox, or maybe my bad impression was caused by the Hardy Heron just including the 0.13.2 version of this musicplayer maintained by Novell. Anyway, I kept using Rhythmbox.

However, yesterday I read Banshee Kickin’ It on the planet and the screenshots made me curious. Since the Intrepid Ibex ships version 1.2 I searched for a PPA at Launchpad — long live PPAs! — and found the PPA for the Banshee Team.

Installing

In order to get the latest version of Banshee, use this PPA:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu intrepid main

You can add it manually by pasting it in /etc/apt/sources.list, or do it with the graphical interface:
Go to System->Administration->Software Sources;
Go to the Third Party Sources tab and add the line using the Add button;
Close the program and press the Reload button in the confirmation dialog.

Now you’re ready to install the latest version of banshee. Use the Add/Remove program or Synaptic or press this link: install banshee.

Use

As soon as you launch the program you’ll notice the sidebar on the left, which contains more items than the one in Rhythmbox.

As you can see, it has — next to the Music Library — a Video Library, Podcast support, integration with internet radio and Last.FM and a PLaylist Generator, which is taken care of by Mirage, which is still under active development.

Settings

Under Edit->Preferences you’ll find the settings, just like you do in other Linux programs. It never really made sense to me that the other two big OSes place it somewhere else.

The default directory for the music library is the one determined by xdg-user-dir specification.
Some functions that I find very nice and can’t find in Rhythmbox are the ReplayGain option, which tries to equal the volume of your songs to make sure you don’t get surprised when Banshee plays a song that was recored with a high volume level and the option that should automatically update the folder strucutre and file names according to the File System Organization options provided below the checkbox. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work.

You can also let external media automatically be copied to your library, which I enabled, and manage the extensions. Their settings are managed via the Extra menu and/or in the extensions’ tab, which took a while for me to find out.

Music library

At first I wondered why it didn’t start to automatically import my music collection, which already was in the music directory. I couldn’t find the option to automatically add new songs, like Rhythmbox has. After searching for a while I found the scan option in Extra->Rescan Music Library. It completely goes through your music library and automatically downloads the cover art. The playlist generator Mirage also starts to scan the music, which takes a while and consumes quite some CPU time. I still haven’t finished it, since it’s interrupted when you switch user or shut down and has to be done all over again afterwards.

You can drag songs, albums and artists to the play queue to add them. Multiple albums and/or artists can be selected at the same time to filter the songs you’re browsing. At the right, above the songlist there is a small search box that you can use to search your collection.

A nice addition is that the program shows a list of recommended artists at the bottom of the program when browsing your music. You have to have the Last.FM extension configured in order to use this.

Last.FM

There are two ways to give your Last.FM credentials: use the Extra menu or press the button in the warning message at the bottom of the program when you go to the Last.FM tab. Both times you’ll get a pop-up asking you for your username and password. When you press OK it automatically checks if they are valid, so you don’t have to check the statistics to be sure that it does work, like you have to do with Rhythmbox.

You can easily add stations by pressing with the right mousebutton on the Last.FM tab in the sidebar. Every type and more are supported.

Podcasts

To add a po

dcast station, press the Subscribe to Podcast button on the right top in the Podcast section or use the context menu of its item in the sidebar. A small pop-up window will appear and the link that’s currently on your clipboard will automatically be pasted in the text box. By default only the latest podcasts will be downloaded.

On the place where you can find the album list in the Music Library, you’ll find the podcast station list. Downloaded podcasts are marked with a small blue dot in front of their entry.

MP3/4-player synchronization

Banshee makes it very easy to synchronize your MP3/4-player. If you want to it can automatically make sure that it has the same songs and videos as you have in the library on the computer and even sync podcasts. Be careful with that, it really copies all music to your player, even if it won’t fit, resulting in an error.

That error seems to have killed my Samsung T10, after the synchronization process — which I started to see what would happen — had halted because there was no space left, I deleted all songs to manually determine what songs I wanted to place on it. However, it seemed like the deletion gave the final blow and the MTP connection got lost. I didn’t find this that strange since MTP isn’t that stable on Linux, so I disconnected the device and plugged it back in. However, it now froze on the startup screen! Reset didn’t help and now I’ve got a bricked MP3-player.

If anyone knows how to solve this, please leave a message.

You can configure the behaviour of Banshee by selecting the main entry of the MP3-player in the sidebar. An overview page will show up with some information about the device and a few checkboxes. The content gets sorted by it’s kind. Please keep in mind that you can’t copy e.g. music directly to the device’s Music Library. You’ll have to drag the files to the device icon.

Make Banshee the standard music player

If you like Banshee and want to make it your main music player, you should set it to default in your system preferences. You can do this by going to System->Preferences->Preferred Applications and change the default music player to Banshee on the multimedia tab. Now the multimedia keys on your keyboard will automatically start Banshee and the music-applet also uses it by default.

Conclusion

I really like Banshee and feel it’s better than Rhythmbox. Although Rhythmbox isn’t bad, it just doesn’t have as many functions and doesn’t look and feel as good as Banshee. The progress bar at the left bottom of the program is one of those small things that makes a program look better and smoother. I find it also easier to configure and more extensive.

If the dicussion of what music player should be default is started again, I’d vote for Banshee.