The Lush theme, like all our recent themes, is built using our common core framework and so shares many of the features of other themes. This includes the powerful theme loom widgets, easy options and responsive layout.

In terms of layout, the Lush theme has much in common with the Mint theme, but has a full width slider and a right-hand sidebar layout.

Anyway you can check out the demo or purchase the theme to find out more.

Mint: Adj. Excellent, wonderful.

Mint is built on the same framework as Pure and Xi, so what’s new with Mint?

• a fresh responsive layout
• background images responsively stretch (optional)
• a new way to handle navigation menus responsively
• updates to the framework which include improved buttons and icons
• BuddyPress continues to prove popular and this theme is ready to roll

Anyway, as always there is a demo so check it out. And of course we’ll be around to help you get the best from the theme.

Old BuddyBar

New WordPress Bar

To Make BuddyPress Use the New WordPress Admin Bar

You can Add support for WordPress’ Admin Bar by setting BP_USE_WP_ADMIN_BAR in wp-config.php.

/*
*  Make BP use WP bar
*/
define('BP_USE_WP_ADMIN_BAR', true);

Simple!

You can see this in action on our Pure theme demo site.

So I was delighted to discover that Antony Ribot had named the ThemeLoom as Responsive Site of the Month in the magainze’s Gallery section (p69, March 2012 edition).

It’s nice to get some recognition now and then for your hard work.

In case you hadn’t noticed the design which the Loom is currently wearing is a child theme of our recently launched Pure theme – one of our responsive WordPress themes.

Both Xi and Pure work like a treat, and look great.
Anthony Ribbot, .Net Magazine March 2012

A Google + Button as an example

This is in response to Kam’s question who asked if this code could be used to add a Google plus button to the Pure theme. (It will also work in Xi and any future framework themes).

The key to this is that with our framework themes you can use the livingos_share_btns action hook to add aditional HTML below the existing buttons.

Use the livingos_share_btns Action Hook

To add our Google+ button we first add a function and action hook to the functions.php file of our child theme.

function livingos_google_plusone() {
		echo '<div class="plusone"><g:plusone size="tall" href="'.get_permalink().'"></g:plusone></div>';
	}

add_action('livingos_share_btns','livingos_google_plusone');

This simply adds the HTML placeholder for the button and adds the function to the action hook. You could add any other buttons here the same way. Even just a simple image based button could go here if you wanted.

Add External Javascript libraries in the usual way

The Google+ button requires some javasrcipt too, which can be loaded into the theme using the standard WordPress wp_enqueue_script method. This code should also be placed in your functions.php file.

function livingos_google_plusone_script() {
	wp_enqueue_script('google-plusone', 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', array(), null);
}

add_action ('wp_enqueue_scripts','livingos_google_plusone_script');

That’s it you should now have something that looks like this sitting at the bottom of each post.

What if you wanted to replace all existing buttons?

To replace the buttons entirely you could also just redefine the function livingos_share_btns() in your child theme instead.

So for example if you wanted to dump twitter and facebook and just add the Google+ button you could just add this instead of the action hook above.

function livingos_share_btns(){
	echo '<div class="share-btns">';
	echo '<div class="plusone"><g:plusone size="tall" href="'.get_permalink().'"></g:plusone></div>';
	echo '<div>';
}

This simply overrides the existing code for display buttons and replaces it with our Google+ button. Like so..

Easy…?

Of course having done all this it is highly likely that we will just add this to the core code anyway, since Google+ buttons are all the rage. But at least you know now how to add any future buttons that may be needed.

And since you are looking at child of the Pure theme, you can now plusone this post below!!

Adding Feature Images to Posts and Pages in the new Mu

To set the image used by the theme for each post or page you must set a feature image in the WordPress post/page editor.

Existing Users

We recognise that there are lots of Mu users out there who have been using the theme for maybe a couple of years. Don’t panic – we have left support for the script in the theme.

All you need to do to reinstate timthumb and have it pick up all your post images again is to download the latest copy of the timthumb script from the official source here and drop the timthumb.php file into the themes \thumbs folder.

And all you need to do to ditch timthumb is delete it! The theme will then revert to WordPress native thumbs when timthumb is not present.

Switching Your Existing site to WordPress thumbs

So if your are upgrading from a previous version, you must delete the timthumb script or even the whole thumbs folder in order to benefit from the WordPress images. But you will also need to go back through all your old posts and set a feature image for each.

We hope this doesn’t inconvenience existing users too much, but timthumb has in the past represented a security vulnerability and while the latest version overcomes these issues, we have long recognised that the script offers few advantages over the native thumbnailing introduced into later versions of WordPress.

Our more recent themes do not use timthumb at all.

What’s New?

The biggest difference that users will notice is the new theme options page, which is a result of forging in parts of our new theme framework into the Mu theme. There are also other goodies, borrowed from the framework that drives our more recent themes like Pure and Xi. You’ll find a new Event Management post type and our Twitter Widget for example.

The latest version also includes a few fixes such as improving compatibility with plugins like JetPack.

Upgrading from Older Versions