S9Y Bulletproof

I bet a lot of people have been wondering what that extremely long thread in the s9y Themes forum ‘Brainstorming: What do we need template-wise?’ is all about, but never found the time or courage to read it from beginning to end At the time of writing this, the thread has 600 replies and 31777 views, it extends to 41 pages and has been going on for about seven months.

Well, this thread is where the magic of Bulletproof happened, it's where it all began with an initial post by me. Basically, I was looking for inspiration, ideas for new s9y templates, trying to figure out what kind of templates were needed. A lot of people chimed in on this suggesting various things. Somehow, this all ended up in the decision to start a ‘template framework’, a base template which would be a good starting point for new templates.

Since than initial post, seven months have passed, and now Bulletproof is finally finished (Well, more or less ). Here are some memorable dates from this long development period:

• Jan 23: That was the day I posted a request to the Themes forum on to brainstorm about template needs
• Jan 26: the first bulletproof zipfile is available
• Mar 12: switching the feed icon for colorsets works
• May 11: the customizable header image works
• Jun 11: the documentation blog is up and running
• Jul 24: first snapshots of the new admin template
• Aug 24: the final Bulletproof v1.0 zipfile

So, it's been quite a ride. We've hit some rough patches along the way, it's been frustrating sometimes, but also a lot of fun. Hopefully, this will also be a lot of fun for the people using it as a template or framework

In the entry on theme options I mentioned the date format and referenced to the strftime section of the PHP manual. While coders and other geeks will already be very familiar with this, new users and those with no PHP experience probably will not be. So let's see what all those funny little characters actually mean.

%A, %B %e. %Y, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Well, these are variable which basically tell Serendipity how to display a date using the PHP function strftime. Every combination of % and a letter stands for a part of the possible date formats. These are the variables actually used in Bulletproof:

• %a or %A Abbreviated (%a) or full (%A) weekday name.
• %b or %B Name of the month. Again, abbreviated or full.
• %d Day of the month as a number with leading zero, i.e. ranging from 01 to 31.
• %e Same as %d above, but with a space instead of the leading zero, i.e. ranging from 1 to 31.
• %m The month as a decimal number with leading zero, i.e. ranging from 01 to 12.
• %y or %Y The year as a decimal number, either with a century indicated (%Y) or without (%y)

These can be combined with dots or hyphens to format the date display in a Serendipity blog. For example, the default date format in Bulletproof is the one mentioned above: %A, %B %e. %Y. This means the date will by default be displayed like this in a blog configured to use the English language:

Full weekday name followed by a comma, then full name of the month and decimal day of the month without a leading zero followed by a dot and the year with century indicated.

For example, for the time of writing this entry, that would result to

Tuesday, August 21.

Got it? However, if this sounds too complicated, just stick with the default or play with the theme option until you get a satisfying result

A frequently asked question (or better: feature) in the s9y forums has always been adding an additional navigation to a s9y-powered blog. In the past, this required modifiying the template's files, until the theme options were added to Serendipity's features. Bulletproof provides an additional navigation bar which can be extensively customized using the theme options. Since these options are very powerful, they will be explained more in detail than the other theme options.

First of all, let's look at the theme options related to the customizable navigation bar:

• Position of the navbar: Choose one of five options for the position of the navigation bar. It can be displayed above or below the banner or in either sidebar. Of course, it can also be deactivated altogether.
• Show navigation links in the footer: The links from the navbar can also be displayed in the page footer as an additional navigation source. These links will be the same links you have in the navigation bar. They are a copy of the navbar links, placed in the footer as a site visitor convenience. When enabled, your visitors will not have to scroll back to the top of the page to use site navigation. Footer navigation links will not be displayed if the navbar is deactivated.
• Show quicksearch in the navbar: If, and only if, the navigation bar is displayed above or below the banner, the input box for s9y's search option can be displayed within the navigation bar. This does not work if the navbar is displayed in either sidebar! Also, the HTML output of the quicksearch sidebar item will be automagically suppressed, you do not have to deactivate it under "Configure Plugins".
• Title for navigation menu: If the navigation menu is displayed in either sidebar, it should have a title. Use this text box to enter the desired title. This title is only for when the navigation menu is displayed in the sidebar - the title will never be displayed if the navigation menu is displayed above or below the header.

Bulletproof's primary design goal originally was to build a layout base which would make it possible to have the "traditional" website/blog layouts so the layout would not break in any modern web browser. Along the way, we also made great use of the so-called "theme options". These are certain options for the template the user can modify in the admin backend under "Manage Styles".

We're pretty confident we have addressed almost every need a user could have and also have simplified some tweaks to a s9y-based weblog which have been frequently asked in the forums in the past. Let's walk you through the theme options available in bulletproof in their order of appearance, shall we?

Although bulletproof is meant to be used as a framework for new templates by template designers, it can also be used as a template out of the box. bulletproof ships with three individual colorsets:

Purple

Blue

Green

All colorsets can be customized to some extent using the theme options.

bulletproof comes with 6 basic layouts:

This covers the most popular layout types for websites and blogs: 3-column layouts with various sidebar combinations, both 2-column layouts possible, and an additional 1-column layout showing the sidebars below the actual blog content (the entries). All of these layout are flexible, meaning their column's widths adjust to the width of the viewer's browser window.

You'll notice some of them are marked CF (content first), meaning the actual content of the blog (the entries) is the first item in the output code generated by Serendipity. It would have been possible to make all layouts CF, but that would have required additional HTML markup which we, the developers, felt was not worth the effort.