Were it up to me, K2 would’ve been out of my hands a long time ago. And of course, in a sense it is (or were) up to me; but I just haven’t had the time / motivation to get it done.
Until now.
Yes, that’s right, I’m finally getting there! So much so, that I would like to ask you to go over to the K2 test installation and just test the shit out of it. There’s not a lot to it honestly; it’s mostly a matter of getting as many eyes on it as possible.
What you should care about (in no particular order):
- Design / layout / whitespace / colors / usability.
- Different Browsers and OS’s
- Odd / stupid behaviour
What you shouldn’t care about:
- Code Clarity.
- Code ‘Smartness’.
- Validation.
I’m primarily interested in doing something about the first batch now, and then we’ll deal with the rest when I release an alpha for people to test. Hopefully this will be very soon.
PS: Please leave your comments here, and not on the K2 website. That way it’s easier for me to keep track of suggestions.
Here is a thought, is there any way to incorporate the javascript explanations of links into the basis of K2. Otherwise the number next to the post for comments doesn’t make sense to someone who hasn’t seen it before. I mention it because I incorporated that idea into one of my designs and had people asking me where to make comments.
Otherwise it looks awesome!
Sweet! Desperatly waiting for a link named “Download” ;)
Nice! I really like it. I think the original Kubrick was a bit to “sugary” for me. This strikes a nice balance between professional design and something a bit more personal – I think it will appeal to most people.
Looks pretty good to me too I took it for a test run on IE, Firefox and Opera they all are looking good except a little displacement on IE but sometimes that’s expected on IE.
Wow, Michael. I am überimpressed.
Couple of things – If I click on Colophon, then back on the main blog link, I get an error. Secondly, I think that the livesearch styling needs to be a bit different. I was thinking that the actual results should highlight as you go down them, rather than a pixel shift to the right or left. There should also be some kind of border. I think you nailed it best in Vader…
I am absolutely loving the way you have used WP features to have a dynamic sidebar similar to this blog, users will appreciate this.
I might not have looked hard enough, but what about that little options/config thing you had planned for K2…? Is that happening?
Awesome work though…
I really like it! Much cleaner than Kubrick.
Just one note — because I’m always complaining about colors ;) —: maybe the header is a bit too bright and gets a lot of focus.
Oh, and as goodsnake said, maybe it should be better to explain what the number after the title is: I tried to implement it on a website I designed and many readers who don’t usually read blogs weren’t able to leave comments because they didn’t know where to go.
http://www.binarybonsai.com/wordpress15/ doesnt work, but http://binarybonasi.com/wordpress15/ does. Not really something with K2 though!
I’m worried that it might be just a bit too wide to read comfortably, especially at high resolutions, but it seems okay on my 19” TFT at 1280×1024.
All in all, I’m very impressed :).
I foobared the second link, it should be http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress15/ !
Looks great…
No image files! I love it! But, I have one crazy question. My apologies if it’s been answered before, I can’t find any mention of it. Will I be able to use an image for the new header area in K2?
Looks great and definately an improvment over Kubrick!
No issues on FireFox 1.0.4 / IE 6.0 WINXP
For the quick search, possibly add some colour or a border so you can tell there is a little search drop down when you type.
Looks wonderful in Firefox, Opera, and Safari on 10.3.9, as expected. I also tried it on the terminals at work (IE 5.5 and above on some older P4 boxes) and it loaded quickly, but LiveSearch didn’t look so hot. The results all ended up on the far right and kind of jumped on top of one another.
Par for the course on IE, I’m sure.
I would be grateful for screenshots of any anomalies seen on IE and the likes.
Otherwise, I’m noting it all down and will step through it all before alpha.
And yes, you can of course put an image in the header :)
Look great! Love it! Can’t wait to see how you do certain things (integration of many nice plugins, etc.)!
Some observations:
- in Firefox/Linux the title in the first entry is underlined when hovered (also the comment count), while in the second entry it’s not. This may be a Firefox bug because I guess it’s the very same HTML code for both articles…
- The category list says “Uncategorized (2)”. While you are using numbers after entry titles for the comment counts everywhere (which is very cool I think), the “(2)” may be disturbing, because it’s in braces and it’s meaning is different. Maybe “Uncategorized (2 Entries)” would be better.
- “## responses to ‘…’” on the entry pages gets underlined when hovered, but it’s just a link to itself. And the “rss” after this title does not have any hover effect.
- And what about setting the background to #eee? #f3f3f3 seems a bit too bright to me…
Hi, not sure if I’m just going insane, but I’m getting a 301 Moved Permanently message (moving to the same URL) for http://www.binarybonsai.com. From a comment above I assume it is meant to be redirecting to http://binarybonsai.com – but it appears to not be doing so.
Am I going mad?
Regarding K2 (once I got to it), it’s looking very nice indeed. Just a point, the numbers on the comments seem a bit faint, but maybe that’s my screen, which is very unreliable when doing colours, not useful when it comes to webdesign…must get myself a cheap CRT.
Overall, good :-) Keep up the excellent writing too!
Nope, some minor problems with my rewriting today. I’ll have a look at it later.
Michael, K2’s looking polished.. nice work.
While I remember – you need to fix your RSS feed – it’s b0rked.
Either that or your making sure every avid reader has to come visit the site! :-)
Looks clean and I’m sure a lot of people will like it. Too clean for my taste but that shouldn’t worry you.
However I don’t see any reason to make the sidebar one big fat and long unordered list. Then shouldn’t all posts be one unordered list? The whole website?
Erm, are you talking about the ‘bonsai or K2?
K2 has a very short sidebar (there are after all only two posts) and one category. The comments (in the sidebar) are ordered (descending) on most recent comment date.
There is little if any content that isn’t “ordered” in one way or another. Personally, K2 is looking pretty schmiko, but what would I know? :)
It’s primarily a legacy thing for me. That’s the way WP has done it for an eternity, so in an effort to not deviate to far from that…
Brendan, I’m talking about K2.
In fact I’m talking about the code. As I said, I don’t get why all the content in the sidebar are marked-up as one long, nested, unordered list. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense to me in a semantic way. Of course semantics should not be overrated but taking into consideration how many people will eventually use this theme it could be a good idea to provide them with clean and semantic code.
Michael, that’s what I expected and to some extent it pretty much makes sense. It isn’t the best solution regarding semantics but it makes it easier for people to throw some more wp-funtions into the sidebar whithout having to worry about the code.
Dude, you kick major ass. If you want any help with anything, here’s another comment telling you that i will be your personal bodyguard or do anything you want to help get k2 out faster. Please! My layout is riding on it!
Best of Luck,
Karan
All I can say is that I’m diggin’ it, and I can’t wait.
Like Karan up there, my brand new place on the web is gonna be dressed to kill – K2 style. Yeah baby.
I’ll remind you that I’m glad to look it over code wise ;) I’m preping a Making Friendly Templates Pt 2 now, related to comments ;)
Looks great! The live search is really nice and has a nice spotlight feel to it. The colors of links and header is perhaps a bit bright for my taste but that’s just a stylesheet away from fixed I suppose :-) It even looks god in IE for mac, not that anybody uses it these days – I hope :-/
Don’t want to jump ahead of myself, but how well does it upgrade? Is it generally the same stylesheet tags and such? I’ve deviated quite a bit from the old Kubrick and I’m a bit curious as to how K2 would look with a modified Kubrick stylesheet applied to it…
To be honest, I don’t know how it upgrades :)
May I suggest?
P.s. yeah yeah, I know, fonts on Windows suck… Thats why I’m getting a Mac Mini this afternoon :D
I’ll take that into consideration.
The people at Microsoft need to learn about font smooting. I mean, damn!
Actually Windows does do font smoothing, it’s just not switched on by default.
Er, yeah, on Windows it’s called ClearType.
Display Properties, Appearance, Effects, check and select ClearType for font-smoothing. Been using it for years.
I’m not sure how it compares to fonts on a Mac, but it looks helluva sweeter than if you just left it turned off.
There are still links pointing to ‘www…’, which has a broken redirect. Plus the redirect page says “Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
It’s funky. The page title in the header points to “http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress15”. It appears that the lack of the trailing slash is what’s causing the redirect to the “www” version of the URL.
But none of that is directly related to K2, so let’s move on to other things.
It fits in an 800px wide browser window, so that’s good. I like the tabs for pages. I’d like to see some rounded corners. I’m getting so tired of blocky rectangles (something I intend to fix on my own site when I get around to working on a new design). Also, would you consider a different default color for the header? Something maybe just a little more subtle, and something to differentiate it more from K1. Maybe a nice shade of green. Or orange. Kubrick liked orange (but I’m not sure that you can get a “subtle” shade of orange out of RGB :) ). I like the Ajaxian search.
Also, I like the fonts for the sidebar, but something in me wants to see a little bit of font variation in the content area. Of course, I’m seeing mostly Verdana and Helvetica. It might be different if I had Lucida Grande. Fonts on the web are such a touchy problem :-/
I like how the CSS is split into separate “positioning” and “color/style” bits. That will make it easier for folks to modify with less danger of breaking the layout.
It looks and works great! I can’t wait for the possibility to try it out! Keep it up Michael ;).
Looks sweet. My only idea would be to leave livesearch off by default, so that it doesn’t become a feature standard for EVERY blog. Only those who know coding and whatnot or those who figure it out, would use it.
If livesearch just works out of the box, then why bother turning it off?
Looking at the first post the trackbacks are before the comments, but numbered with the comments. That means that if someone says that comment 15 for example is very interesting and then someone posts a trackback post 15 becomes post 16.
I think itd do that, but itd doesnt really make much sense. How about either not numbering the trackbacks, or start from 1 again for the comments?
Michael, here’s an example of the LiveSearch div issues on IE6. This was taken on a terminal at work.
http://no.oneslistening.com/wp-upload/bonsai-IE6.jpg
Hope it helps some.
#40 has an excellent point. For example, this post would be rendered useless if trackbacks were added, as I would be referencing to the incorrect comment.
Here on BB, you had an excellent system where there was a separate section for Trackbacks/Pingbacks which was differentiated from the comments. I loved that, it is so easy to who has tracked or pinged the entry immediately, in a stylish presentation.
I also agree that certain features should be turned off by default. This has implications to that options panel Michael was talking about, or if that doesn’t work out, then a simple config.php or whatever with some simple boolean-type variables that control the layout would be good.
1) The web communtiy thanks you for leaving nice titles off by default, thanks.
2) LiveSearch results need to be fenced in by a border obviously, and yes it needs to be turned on by default, SPREAD AJAX. An all around highlighted box would be nice
3) Big ups for the boolean config.php
4) May the force be with you, complete this.
It’s looking great, but I can’t help but think there will be a few Binary Bonsai lookalike sites after the launch of K2…
Fantastic upgrade from the original, though.
^um yea…
P.S. It your big contribution to the communtiy, thanks!
:)
hey michael
great progress on k2 :) got one question though. will this theme incorporate a text column width of 500px or less?
thanks
Looking great, one thing I would change is the hover tab is like a brown or grey and it really doesnt fit into the site. Change the hover color to something more pleasing like a lighter version of the k2 background and it will look great.
I’d be thrilled. :)
G, I love you! Some fonts look quite fuzzy now, but it’s SO much better. Thanks!
Oh, and please, change the way comments are numbered! Post numbers are almost useless this way… also here on BB. :)
My suggestion: don’t number trackbacks, and start counting from the first comment.
P.s. and put back those “Next post” links! :)
I was so hungry for K2 when I saw it awhile back that I turned Kubrick on my personal site into a look-alike (well, a look-alike for those who don’t see so well).
Looks great! Is it going to have Gravatar support built in?
Hey, in safari it seems the white space on the left-hand side of the entry text is 5-10px wider than the space on the right… or on the right of the navigation. If you get me.
Why have you dropped the www. ? How do you configure that jazz… I’m thinking of purchasing a domain – i want blog.myaddress.com and people.myaddress.com – is www the same idea? I know – Google is my friend, but I’m so lazy – it’s summer.
Oh and Windows… smoothing. muhahaha.
Callum: You use cnames. Your domain registrar should show you how. As for what to choose to buy your domain: Stay the hell away from GoDaddy. I tried using them for my home webserver that powers my site, and it wouldn’t let me connect to my server from it unless I did a redirect or got nameservers.
If you aren’t hosting your site at home then I guess GoDaddy’s coll.
Cnames just forward your site though… But for me they’re fine.
As for binarbonsai, Michael just made a Cname “WWW” and had it redirect to “binarybonsai.com”.
Good luck on finding a good domain nmae! Took me a day to find my sucky one.
Matthew (#40) I was saying that it’s okay that it’s built in and everything and “works out of the box” I just meant that if it is on by default, it is no longer unique to those who know bout it. Therefore, you can surf blogs without EVERYSINGLE one having livesearch on it.
I’ve tried it on all sorts of resolutions (basically anything normal not widescrteen from 800×600 to 1600×1200) and it looks spiffy. Great job, now if i could just use it offically on my site without just grabbing the css and putting it together. :p
Thanks Karan, I’m in the UK so I thought I’d go with 123-reg. I think they’re owned by Pipex – who do our offices’ Broadband… and they’re good stuff. So – cnames I will ask about. Just forwarding right now – I have to renew my .Mac (they got me hooked on Tiger integration) and that’s where my site is living right now. Thank you!
someone got their hands on it early!!
I think the side navbar shold be more sepearted from the content block, and the same goes for the footer information. Perhaps colouring it in? or moving the footer outside the layout like you’ve done on binarybonsai. Otherwise, it looks quite good. Not quite as good as I was expecting though.
Here’s another thought that just struck me, It would be nice to include several alternate colourschemes with the theme, say changing the dominant colour for everything from blue to orange say. Might add some variety to the huge number of blogs that will appear with K2 after the release.
I also agree with a commenter somewhere further up the list, adding nice rounded corners to everything would be great!! :) The square boxes are starting to bug me after staring at it for a while.
Looking good Michael! I can’t wait to get my hands on K2 and start customizing it. :)
Simply amazing! Keep up the great work!
Excellent! I can’t wait until you’re finished with this (though I don’t want you to rush it). I think it has the edge over the original Kubrick visually, for sure.
Anyway, the reason I’m commenting is to let you know that I tested it out in Konqueror, because I couldn’t see any comments about that here yet. I can’t see any problems at all. Looks fine in Lynx too which is a bonus :)
Great work.
Areus: What? You mean Michael? Or you?
Take a look at trackback #2
Uh-oh. I wonder if Michael knows about this…
you think it was ripped off? Maybe he released it to someone for testing?
Probably released for testing.
Take a look at the permalinks.
http://bicherele.net/2005/06/18/testing-k2/
Looks like hes just testing it.
I am the only one currently in possession of the K2 source code; you figure it out from there :)
uh oh.
Looks like hes just taken/made his own CSS judging by the lack of “K2 is powered by WordPress & K2” in the footer.
Given that you can go in and grab the CSS I shouldnt think its that difficult to copy the style (after all its been done plenty of times before with plenty of sites).
Great job on this theme, really like it. Areus, how in the world did you do that. I was able to take the style.css file but you have to also take the other php files to make it work properly, and there seems to be no way to do this but to connect through ftp, which is not allowed with this site. So Areus, I don’t know how you did that. Anyway, I can’t wait until this theme is out and I will be switching my site’s theme instantly after this one is released. I am so greedy, because I want to steal the code now! Seems impossible to me though. Guess I’ll have to wait (or get in contact with Areus…)
He’s not the first either :)
Really? I read about Karan asking to have a copy of the K2 theme for editing? I would love to be part of this idea if it ever happens. As he said, I don’t need any recognition, I just want to mess around with the colors and stuff and I (obviously) want to get my hands on this beautiful theme for my site because I can’t find any good themes anymore that don’t use images and are all in CSS.
I think K2 is more than style.css and corresponding HTML code, as far as I understand it’s also a quite nice piece of PHP code (which is invisible to the visitor), e.g. to detect which plugins are installed and so on (will there be a K2 control panel in WordPress admin?). This makes it interesting for my site too, which is not “based on” Kubrick (and won’t be “based on” K2 either), but “inspired by” K2.
By the way, where has the comment and ping/trackback separation gone? I liked it more than the current “sort by type, then by date” approach…
Its not that hard to work out what WP function/plugins to use and stick them in the right place. I would just question why its worth doing when K2 is out at some point soon. Presumably before Duke Nukem Forever though ;-)
I have a feeling it will be released quite soon and by that I mean in a few days. Michael, I don’t know if you can tell us this, and sorry for sounding like an impatient little kid, but when are you planning to release it?
…or hopefully, a few hours…
Hey Michael, whenever I refresh this page, first a black background shows up and then the page loads. Why is this? Usually it will be a white background and then your gray website background and then the page loads. Is this the site or is it Firefox?
Seems like you’re gonna need to download k2scheme.css too for it to work.
Everyone is under the impression that I am the one that got it early. It was not me. That is not my blog.
I’ve already ported the ‘beta’ version (wordpress15) of K2 to iBlog. But i’ll wait for the real deal before screaming about how great it is.
Isn’t it nice that Kubrick has the Apple-o-fant “woo, its been leaked!” mentality behind it… “I wonder if it was a publicity stunt”. hah. I love it all, we’re such geeks.
Sexy.
Perhaps that’s not too constructive, but that’s what immediately came to mind.
Is Kubrick really dead? According to the test blog it says it is
What does this mean for K2? If you need any more beta testers I will be glad to test. Does it come with support for asides as I use them for my blog?
I like what I see… I will definately incorporate that into the next version of my website sometime this off-season.
http://www.blackadam.com
Haha, it does say it’s dead.
Everything’s looking sweet. Header is nice and clean. The livesearch is working properly and the spacing between lines is good as well. Nice!
I think that the post on the test blog called ‘Kubrick is Dead’ means that kubrick (1.0 theme) is gone and K2 is in. I may be wrong but he didn’t say K2 is dead, he said Kubrick is Dead. Hope this means K2 will be released soon. I just can’t wait.
Like everybody i’m eagerly awaiting for the release of K2 … i dont really care for the layout (altough…as you can see by my website i made one similar to BB with the k1 code) …what i want to see is how the template is going to be structured…specially the sidebar.
I do have one minor grip with this layout though, the link for the comments. At least for me, when i first saw this layout, i was a bit confused at where was the link. This might have happened cause it was a small post(i mean…without the “read the rest” link). I like the idea but i dont know if it will work well for people who haver never seen the layout.
Anyway, good luck to Michael on finishing this … if he still isnt a Geek God, i’m sure he will be after the release of K2. ;)
André, you’re not the first to mention the comments link, so I will be looking into improving it.
On the K2 test site, the most recent post’s comment counter link (the number after the post name) underlines on mouseover, whereas the others dont :-/
I really like the comments link. I think it’s prefect. And the title gets you to the comments as well, so I wouldn’t change anything. But maybe add a hotlink on the comments page to jump to th commemnts so when you click on the number of comments next to the title it jumps you to the beginning of the comments. Just a thought.
I didnt meant to say that i do not like the way the link is, i do, i think it hads flavour to the design but in my opinion it’s not entirely obvious to people that see the layout for the first time, specially if comments havent been made to a entry.
Unfortunately, i can’t come up with a better alternative.
Why is the permanent link for the first post underlined, and the rest aren’t? Is that a bug or is it supposed to be like that?
Actually, I see how it is now. If you’ve visited the link, the hover is underlined. Hmm, I don’t like that very much, but it’s okay. :)
I really like the new K2 layout. A lot! You mentioned in one of the other posts (I think!) that there will be an option to switch between a two-column and a single-column layout. That sounds fantastic, but can I ask for more options? ;)
Would it be possible to also provide a two-column layout with the sidebar on the left? And perhaps a more fluid layout? Sometimes I’d prefer the layout to be able to expand beyond the hard-set width that this (and just about every other WP theme) uses.
Thanks and keep up the great work!