Mandigo

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading ...

Posted by Jim on Sep 27, 2008 31 views

I have been trying to fix a problem with widgets not appearing properly on the sidebar. This is for a new Wordpress driven site, with mostly pages of content and 3 categories for a small number of posts. Items such as fashion, recipies and pubs. Pubs such as pubs, bars and taverns.

After getting all my work done, I ran into problems with the sidebar showing up properly. This led me to grabbing a few other themes to review. It is a very easy process. I need a 2 column theme that displays 125×125 ads properly along with a google adsense skyscraper and a video skyscraper.

They have all messed it up for some goofy reason or another. Do these people not test their themes for even simple things like a common widget or direct adsense code for a skyscraper ad to display properly? That should be a common thing to test for before release.

Now I have gotten to the point where I can re CSS a site to see what elements do and dont work. Yes, yes, I could spend a few more hours troubleshooting out the CSS problem on the theme I created from a bunch of empty shells, and a few other sites. But I figured let me find one that works, then back out from there.

mandigo from www.onehertz.com by tom is a very good theme. It has some goofy things in it, such as why is he adding an icon to the side of widets in sidebars? I need to turn that off.

But it is a very feature rich theme - variable header pictures - just drop your files in the folder and check off a box.

And that is a funny thing about this theme - it has a lot of check boxes and code to go with it. I wonder if it is too heavy for a larger site, especially where minimal themes are a better choice. I don’t expect the traffic for this project to be that large, so given the lack of time, I will probably stick with this theme till I get time to debug the CSS problem on the sidebar.

Specifically - the first item is shifted and every other item shifts over with it. I have checked any stray inheritences. But as I said above, I have dropped in a few other released and downloaded by a lot of people themes, and they generally dont handle things well.

I like the menu - it saved me from having to run the code I already wrote with a nav.php file and a CSS drop in for a drop down horizontal navigation menu. Here though is where my custom work is better then Mandago. I have menu items that go directly to ?cat= pages. Now I have to put the code inside a page to use this auto generated menu. Not a big deal.

If you want a full featured theme for wordpress with variable colors, a variable size from 800 to 1024, a dynamic menu for your pages and widget support, then I recommend you check this one out.