First, let me thank you for all your appreciation. The concept of making ExtJS based WP Theme is rather controversial, thus your appreciation places all of you on my side. Thank you. Now let me answer a couple of your questions and comments. Most of my answers shall start from the following: “This is true… I am working on it…”.

Answers below.

Bugs, problems, mistakes…

Posted by Aaron
The theme is excellent but not ad friendly.

This is true. I am working on it. In short, this is because of the javascript that ads insert into the code of the page. In most examples it does not work with the javascript that the theme is adding. Be patient I will fix it somehow.

Posted by Michael Sync
Another thing (I got this fact after posting the first comment) is that why my comment is not clear in textbox after posting the comment.. you cache it?

It is because the theme is posting a comment via Ajax, without page refresh. This will be fixed in the next release for sure.

Posted by Ehab
My good freind - you should also take care of typography - while crossing in designing complex themes as this. Copyblogger, Cutline - these are excellent example of themes with wonderful typography.

What can I say. It is true. I am working on it. Thank you for good design examples.

Posted by Anirudh
Very very nice. but does it gracefully degrade with javascript disabled?

You are right. The theme is not a set of HTML and CSS files it is javascript application that makes use of ExtJS library. No chances that it will work when javascript is disabled. But, check the comment made by Marin. Meaning: be consequent. If you disable javascript then disable CSS also, this could help.

Posted by Nicd
… But somewhat worried about what to show older browsers then. Might still be using this for my site some day.

True. It does not work in old browser. Although,it works on text based browser (like Lynx). On the other hand please check the browser statistic for my site (below). Most of the people use brand new stuff. There is nothing to worry about.

Firefox 2.x 70.2%
MSIE 7.x 10.5%
MSIE 6.x 5.46%
AppleWebKit 522.x 3.29%
Opera 9.x 2.68%
Posted by Youki
…one thing is very sad about ajax based themes and sites : adress does not change. You can not bookmark a page in particular. Could that be fixed???

This is true. The address does not change when you browse the site. But all most of the links are permanent. By this I mean, when you copy the link location, when you copy a shortcut (from the title of the post for example) and then you put it into the browser address bar, then it will go into the correct page. Simply specking, the below permanent link works correctly:

http://extjswordpress.net/10-release/
Posted by Mitch
But when I tried it on my site (WP 2.3), no go: I loaded the theme, hit, ‘View site’, and watched it load…and load…and load….
More precisely, the sidebar, header and footer seemed to load OK, but it couldn’t handle the posts. Some glitch in the SQL access?
Best,

This (on 99%) is the problem caused by incompatibility between the theme and one of the plugins you are using on your site. “Amazon Product Preview?”, “Google Analytics?”. Please give me some time I will work hard trying to fix it.

Posted by Richard
It’s slick but the aesthetics need a little work. Is there going to be an option for a header image?

Fore sure, there will be an “Options” in the next release of the theme. You may expect header image change. For now on you are welcome to alter the theme by yourself.

Posted by Playnotrick
…
Now all the external links in my blogs are redirected to soemthing like
For google.com http://www.targetlife.com/redirect.php?url=http://www.google.com
When i click on this link, I want to oepn the links in a new window but the Ajex catches this and it tries to open the link in the same window.
Can you help me with this? Any pointers or anything?
I will greatly appriciate it.

Thank you for mentioning this. This is the hardest problem I had when working on the theme. I was trying to make an universal link handler but it shows without success. The current code looks as follows:

<script>
. . .
    // post click universal handler
    var maskClick = function(e){
        // find the "a" element that was clicked
        var a = e.getTarget(‘a’);
        if (a) {
            if( a.rel != ‘noajax’
                && cleanUrl.indexOf(Wp.bloginfo.url) == 0
                && cleanUrl.indexOf(‘wp-admin’) == -1
                && cleanUrl.indexOf(‘wp-login’) == -1
                && cleanUrl.indexOf(‘feed’) == -1
              ){
                e.preventDefault();
                Wp.theme.loadPosts(a.href);
            }
 
        }
    };
. . .
</script>

As you may see It is not a brilliant one, but it opens a workaround for your problem. Links with “rel” parameter set to “noajax” are not handled by the function, Try something like this

<a href="http://extjswordpress.net/10-release/" rel="noajax">1.0 Release</a>

And if you have a better alternative for the click handler then let me know, please.

You are using the theme

I really appreciate that you decided to use ExtJS base theme. It promotes not only my little work but first of all ExtJS library which IMHO is the most advanced on the market. Thank you. Keep in mind that the library is huge: ~500kB of javascript, ~80kB of CSS plus images. If you have a chance to compress on the fly it it will for sure make your site more responsive. (Unfortunately my host company do not offer it, sorry.)

Posted by andy
thanks for the nice theme, however, think it too wide, how can i adjust the width and wanna make the font size bigger in the content… i’m not an expert, please let me know how to adjust.

You are welcome to alter the theme according your wish. Start from making adjustments on style.css. Thank you.

Posted by Astray
… How would I change it so that it only uses one style?
…I’m also having a problem with the searches not showing any results in Safari / Firefox / IE7. No error messages or anything, it just goes away a second or two after it says “Searching”.
…I found another bug of sorts… When ever I link to an image within a post or page, and click on it, it loads the image as text, so I either end up getting a page full of weird characters or the browsers crashes.

On lines 225-275 of js/theme.js you will find a definition of “style switched menu” simply remove it. Then go to header and change this:

<!-- Theme CSS -->
<?php if ( isset($_COOKIE['ys-theme']) ) : ?>
<link id="theme" rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/css/<? echo substr($_COOKIE['ys-theme'],2,strlen($_COOKIE['ys-theme']));?>.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php else :?>
<link id="theme" rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/css/aero.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php endif ;?>

into this, for example:

<!-- Theme CSS -->
<link id="theme" rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/css/aero.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

There are 5 ExtJS styles included into the theme: deafult (here simply remove the line), aero.css, vista.css, gray.css, galdaka.css. More style can be fonud on ExtJS forum. Start from here: http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6039

About images links try to add “rel” paramater to the links, like this

<a href="http://extjswordpress.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/p2.gif" rel="noajax">Calendar</a>
Posted by Will
Is there a limit to the number of items in the sidebar that you know of? I tried to add a couple of extra ones, but anything more than six seems to break the sidebar.
Posted by dudtn
sidebar is not properly work in my blog,
what’s wrong with my blog???

Both your comments shows that I really need to solve the problem of compatibility of the theme and Wordpress plugins. This is the cause. Please deactivate all your plugins first then activate them one by one and… let me know which one stopped the theme work correctly. I will try to fix it. Once again thank you very much for all of your comments. Keep checking the site, I am working on the next release.

A Minor Update…

Posted by Kassad
A minor problem:
The title for the Calendar widget does not show and for the love of my life, I could not find where to edit.

Please, go to Admin Panel >> Presentation >> Widgets. Click Configure button on Calendar Widget and key in your tille…