Great skin. Very original and some nice smarts built in.
Question: Why does the total main menu system , top and side, go grey and inactive on a single post view?

Thanks for taking a look! I really appreciate you giving feedback.

The vertical and horizontal tabs, used to filter posts by root category or by type, are disabled on a single post for two related reasons. I'm not happy with either reason and will probably change that behavior over time.

1) It doesn't make sense to filter a single post, so clicking on another tab would leave the single post and go back to a list of posts. I'm not sure how intuitive or confusing that would be to the reader of the blog yet.

2) I haven't figured out how to go from a multi-post url to a single post url to a multi-post url and keep the url params that make sense.

For instance, if you click on a subcategory like "Wild Bird Feeding", you get

the url with ?blog=7&s=bird&cat=62

with the Wild Bird and All tabs selected.

Next, clicking on a permalink gets you something like

http://www.thewildlifeporch.com/2008/02/25/artistic-and-elegant-bird-feeders

and you lose the root category and type selection.

If the tabs were active, you could click on the "Sites" tab -- but where should that take you? (a) Sites for all categories? (b) Or sites for the Wild Bird Feeding category? (c) Or Wild Birds?

If option b or c, how would you know, since the params are gone?

Not to mention you have to rebuild the url from scratch from a single-post page -- regenerate_url doesn't work.

Hope my explanation makes sense. Let me know if any of ya'll have insight or ideas on this.

- Cindy Rae

Next, clicking on a permalink gets you something like

http://www.thewildlifeporch.com/2008/02/25/artistic-and-elegant-bird-feeders

and you lose the root category and type selection.

Actually that's not totally true, but not the big issue with no navigation from a single post page. The post itself still has all the criteria that got it to be the result of a filtered search - just not obvious in the URL. You can change how the URLs look to see what I mean on your Blog settings->pick a blog->URLs subtab, then change them back to nice looking URLs.

If the tabs were active, you could click on the "Sites" tab -- but where should that take you? (a) Sites for all categories? (b) Or sites for the Wild Bird Feeding category? (c) Or Wild Birds?

Answer (a). Without it you have no site navigation to anywhere from a single post page. I don't have your web open right now, but the tabs on the top and the left do different purposes yah? So maybe re-activate the set that is much more global would be enough to let a visitor get back to the blog's home page without using the 'back' button?

By the way it looks great and is a strong use of b2evolution's features. I hope you would be willing to zip up and share a version of it that doesn't make your web not be unique but shares some of the coolness you've done there.

oh snap! The title image and butterfly go back to the beginning. Didn't seem intuitive though because I had tab links that went dead ya know?

I just left a comment and noticed an error. It does not show up on the page, but the page title has the "trying to get property of a non-object" error that seems to plague people for various reasons. I think you would have to either log out or use a different browser then leave a comment to see it happen.

As a clue: after leaving the comment it told me my comment was in moderation (normal) but then told me their was no post to display. Seems like it didn't make it back to the post I commented on?

Thanks for all the responses, everyone!

#1 -- On the tab navigation from a single page -- I'll work on re-enabling the tabs so they take the user back to the root category and the type for the single post.

#2 -- On the url for a single post in the format of year/month/date/title --

How do I regenerate a url with params for category, type, etc? Regenerate_url doesn't seem to work (or at least I couldn't feed it the right stuff to lose the single-display params).

#3 -- The commenting going to an empty post instead of the commented post --

EdB -- thanks for letting me know the comment; I hadn't noticed that one. It may be related to the problem I'm having with preview showing no post live vs. local (I had to override the native $disp handlers and probably missed something).

#4 -- about sharing the skin, etc --

It's in my plan -- just wanted to get it cleaned up (the commented-out code removed, additional code comments). It may take me awhile; the skin itself rather depends on 5 widget/plugins and a bit of code that overrides b2e code and some that supports the skin.

I'll probably do the widget/plugins one at a time first, then the skin.

If I don't get a chance to upload a cleaned-up everything by early May, I'll just go ahead and upload what I have. (I'll be out of the loop for the most part from the end of May to about July or August).

Thanks again!

Cindy Rae

Very clean look and very impressive use of b2evolution as a CMS more than a blog.

EdB or anyone else --

I can't get the category from the multi-post page to show up on the single-post page. Details in the thread,

http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?p=70141#70141

- Cindy Rae

I've updated the blog with some simple navigation fixes to handle the situations where the user is looking at something besides a multiple-post view.

The single-post view now has active tabs, with the selected tabs reflecting the root category and type of the single-post.

Not perfect, but it will do for now.

Thanks for the input. Keep it coming!

- Cindy Rae

IMHO this is one of the most elegant skins I've seen dress up a database.

Hi Cindy,

It's a lovely blog. Always nice to see people doing beautiful things with the software.

Good luck

Thanks for all the kind comments!

It really helps on the frustrating days.

- Cindy Rae

Would you be willing to share your index.main.php and posts.main.php ?
Then I 'll have a solid base for me to work on a version of 'display by entrytype'

Topanga --

Very simply, you just need a url to your blog with the right url parameters, for example:

http://www.myb2eblog.com/?blog=7&types=1

to display all posts only (no links, podcasts, etc.).

My tabbed list-entries-by-type is done via a widget, so the *.main.php's may not help you much. I'll try to upload the widget soon to the b2evolution plugins.

Thanks,

Cindy Rae

[/code]