Sidebar
I know sidebars seem to be out of vogue overall, but I think something like a sidebar, some sort of extra field in addition to the main content for a page would be a nice addition. A place to add some additional content to a page, especially on blog pages, that supplements the content of the page.
Site Logo
An oldie, but a goodie from RW.
Also, I know a lot of what I suggest could be done by a user adding code to a theme, or building their own theme. I’m thinking mostly for the non-code users. The people that just want to write a blog and build a few simple pages and don’t want to touch code, so they purchase a nice Typed.com theme from 3rd-party dev. like myself.
Thanks for the feedback guys! Here’s a quick rundown.
Navigation
Knowing the active page is on our wish list.
No plans to support nested pages.
Banners
On our wish list but we have some more to think about regarding this to ensure image support, for posts and the site in general, is both flexible and future proof.
Post List Count
We plan to add support for choosing the number of posts per page. This will highly likely be chosen by the user in the Typed Dashboard on a per site basis.
From sales perspective, in my opinion it is important to have at least some sort of end user customisation available. It is hard to sell a theme (even if it is for 10 $) if the end user does not have any possibility (without touching the source code) to adapt the look.
Which chances do we have that you introduce theme variations into the theme.json before public go-live of custom theme uploads?
The end user could get an select drop down in the Dashboard with these items:
We’ll discuss it. but theme variations is not something that’s high on our priority list (I’d rather get banners and featured images into Typed first).
There’s nothing stopping you from including some extra css files in the download and giving customers instructions on how to change their theme. I know it’s not ideal, but it’d work for now.
Perhaps some pre-made snippets included with the download, that users can include in their site-wide code area with copy and paste would allow the colours to override the defaults?
Perhaps. It isn’t a bad alternative to start with. For users who are afraid of code though, even little code snippets, it can be a hurdle to get them to use them.
I have users with RW that refuse to copy and paste snippets from my site for Social Badges. And that is probably as simple as a code snippet can be. The beginner level users that Typed is so great for would definitely like using a select or checkbox or some other control in the admin panel more than copying and pasting code snippet. Plus as you know one minor typo or forgetting to highlight all of a line of code and pasting it in can cause problems that create unwarranted support and trouble for the user.
I see that a complex theme variations system for Typed isn’t a simple request at all. And I don’t think it needs something like that exactly. But it does need something extra on the backend admin panel I think to help people customize their pages a little here and there eventually.
I figured that’s what you meant. Just discussing things. Bouncing thoughts around since theme development for Typed is brand-new. Unexplored territory.
Desktop app can be your friend here. Nice and simple app that procedurally generates your theme zip while using user defined styles. Just been playing with this idea in Livecode.
Because they would be generating there own custom zip file, you could give them the option to add just about anything you like to the theme, such as social icons, graphics, footer content, etc etc…
Here’s an update for Theme Preview app. You’ll want this one as it includes in-app updates which we’ll be using going forward. Also includes updated example content for the site.
For those of you looking to develop themes for Typed we’d like to offer you a free account to help you make this happen. If this is of interest to you please send me an email to james@realmacsoftware.com with the email address you use to sign in to Typed. If you’ve not yet registered for an account you can do here https://www.typed.com/register
Is it possible to add a preview image to the zip archive to have this one displayed like the inbuilt themes?
Something we’re planning to add in a future update.
What about showing the theme version number from the json file below the theme name?
Also something we’re planning to add.
We’ve got some bigger features to add to themes in the new year too.
Maybe it is good to have a download button there, so that a once uploaded theme can be downloaded again (good for support requests).
When you upload a theme.zip some of the files and folders are excluded, as mentioned here. Therefore it’s unlikely we’d add this feature as we’d be returning a subset of the original resources. As mentioned above, we’re looking to add the theme version number and additional info to the upload page so customers are aware of exactly which version they’re running.
