WordPress Experiments

Tadaaam! My first serious modification of theme released for downloads .
On my sites I use themes created by Sadish Bala because.. they are just great. I have played with them long enough to feel comfortable with (almost) all kind of modifications. Hence I decided not only create MistyLook (I guess the most famous from all) with two sidebars but also make it available for downloads.
I didn’t change much apart from adding extra sidebar and creating new header and profile images. I also changed the way particular elements of the list in sidebar are being displayed – the background is constant, no sidebox for each part of the list. I think it looks better when you have to sidebars side by side.
This version has all features regular MistyLook has such as Page Template for archives, contact and links pages [to use them you need to create new page and assign appropriate template to it ] and co-operation with widget plugins and the newest version of WordPress (2.3).
I will appreciate all kinds of opinion and information on how it works for you and if you have encountered any problems (although I do hope you won’t have any ).
You can download it here or on official MistyLook site. Have fun!
  MistyLook with 2 sidebars (97.8 KiB)

My favorite plugin for images is NextGEN ( I have already written about it). There was only one small item missing – possibility of displaying random images in the sidebar. Actually such option is offered by plugin author but as a widget and I don’t use them. What to do then?
I have had a closer look at both nggwidget.php (to find out how it works) and nggfunctions.php (to check out how functions are created). Hmm… that looked pretty clean and clear so I decided to give it a try.
From nggwidget.php I’ve copied all lines responsible for display and insert of random and recent images (lines 171 to 272) and pasted them to nggfunctions.php file just above // Global function.
Then in the sidebar I’ve put in the chosen place following function
<?php nggDisplayRandomImages(x,y,z);?>
where x is number of images to display, y = width of thumbnail, z = height of thumb. I had to also change a little nggallery.css (part commented as /* –Sidebar widget–*/ ) to have random images the same style as others and… that’s all.
Works like a charm – I have random image in the sidebar without widget .
UPDATE: Sometimes I do too much ;). Accidently I’ve discovered you can just activate random images widget under plugin tab in your admin panel and then put in the sidebar code I’ve written above…