I’m making use of genesis-style-selector introduced in version 1.8 of Genesis. One simply has to add
add_theme_support( 'genesis-style-selector', array( 'treacle-plum' => 'Plum' ) );

to functions.php. Then you add .treacle-plum <selector> to the style.css file for each selector that needs to have its color altered. It really took no time at all to do this part. Most of the time is spent in redoing all the graphic elements.

The current design is using hooks to insert the date before the title, the edit link after the title, and the post footer after the post content. It also uses it to do the footer by disabling the standard Genesis footer in favor of my own. All in all it took me about 8-10 hours to get the site looking like it does now. The majority of that time was spent looking at the site through Developer Tools to target the exact elements to style them. Getting the specificity right for the CSS can be challenging, but not terrible. However, that time is considerably less than what it took to get the old theme written. I have to acknowledge though that I have gotten more proficient with CSS, PHP , and HTML and that I was able to copy some code from the old theme. I would still argue that you would see much faster times to completion on designs than if you are not using a framework at all.

There are still a few things to tweak like getting the edit post link to be on the same line as the title, preventing the post footer from displaying on pages and getting my Typekit fonts working again. I don’t see those taking very long and if I encounter any difficulties the support forums at StudioPress totally rocked it for me. There are other frameworks out there like Carrington and Hybrid (a couple that I have tried) and themes that allow for tons of modification through options (like WooThemes Canvas theme), but I would highly recommend Genesis and the Simple Hooks plugin if you are considering putting your design on top of a framework.

The move will allow me to consolidate Orthogonal Creations and Jon Breitenbucher under this Network using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin. It will also allow me to move WoW Ravings to it’s own blog and pull the Warcraft stuff off of Playing with Technology. That is what I’ll be working on for the next few days of my vacation. The cool thing is that this is all stuff that I should be able to use for some ideas I have for Voices.

So far I am very happy with the upgrade and am looking forward to playing with custom posts and the other features added. But the most pressing thing for me is taking the five sites I maintain and moving them to networks so that they can have sites of their own and so that I only have one code installation to worry about. For example, on this site, it would be nice to have another site warcraft.jon.breitenbucher.net that could have it’s own theme and plugins. Currently, I would have to muck about with custom code to style the WoW ravings page differently and while I know how; I just don’t feel like doing it. So I am looking into ways to move this site and four of the others to the wordpresscore.breitenbucher.net codebase since it is already set up as a MultiSite installation. I’m sure that @andrea_r and other WP folks can give me some pointers. If all goes well I hope to have this migration done in the next week or so. I think doing this will give me some good experience for what we will be able to do with Voices as well.

If you’re not aware there is a new feature in CSS3 called @font-face. This feature is intended to address one of the major issues of publishing on the Web: not all readers have the fonts you used in the design! For graphic artists, publishers and typography nuts (such as myself) this has been a real issue. We develop a fantastic layout and design with fonts that make the entire piece or site look gorgeous, only to see it on a friends computer displayed in Arial, Georgia, or Trebuchet. @font-face and the Typekit service are here pull us out of this Dark Age of Web typography.

So how does it all work? You can see Web fonts with @font-face for a more detailed explanation, but the gist is that you host your fonts on the Web and then access them as you would any other Web file. It sounds great and if you take a .otf file and put it in a Web accessible directory then you’ll be able to use it with @font-face. Sounds great doesn’t it? So why do we need Typekit? Well, fonts are software. I know it sounds crazy but in terms of the licensing of their use they are treated like software. This means that you are allowed to have a copy on your computer and to use it to produce documents, but you cannot freely distribute it. This is exactly what you would be doing if you put that .otf file in a public Web directory.

Typekit has developed a solution which a number of font foundries seem to think is a good solution. Typekit’s solution is to host the fonts on their servers and require you to use some javascript to be able to access the fonts in your sites. They have arranged their offerings into 4 packages: Trial, Personal, Portfolio, and Corporate. Prices range from free to $49.99/month. A free account will entitle you to 5GB of bandwidth per month, two fonts from the 62 in the Trial Library to be used on one website, and you will have to display the Typekit badge (as you see in the bottom right of the site). Other plans increase the bandwidth, number of fonts you can use, number of fonts to choose from, and allow you to opt out of displaying the badge.

Once you join you’re asked to provide a website where you would like to use the service. Once you supply a URI and advance, you’ll be presented with some javascript to copy and put in the head of the pages using the fonts. After pasting the code into your webpages you can return to the Tyepekit site and select the fonts you would like to use. You can do so by browsing the appropriate library for your plan and then clicking the ADD button next to the font. Doing so will try to open a Popup window (Firefox complained and I had to allow an exception). At this point you will find directions on how to use the fonts on your site and you’ll be able to disable weights and styles that will not be used in your design so that the payload of the javascript is as small as possible. When you are finished here just click on the Publish button to make the fonts available to your site.

Overall I was very pleased with the way the service operated and the fonts that were available. I didn’t see any Adobe or Linotype designs in the Trial Library, but there were plenty of good fonts. Hopefully Typekit can get the traction necessary to attract larger foundries to use the service. I so want to use my beloved Helvetica and Myriad Pro. For now I’ll go with Liberation Sans for headings and such and M +1c Garogier Liberation Sans for the body text. If you are browsing in the most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Safari then you should be seeing the site with my Typekit fonts. I’d encourage everyone that has a blog or website to check them out.

The reason I am considering BuddyPress is to distinguish the WPMU install administered by Instructional Technology from the one administered by Web Services. Yes, we will have two installations. It was decided that blogs that were more official in nature needed to have branding similar to the new website and more restictions on content. So the Instructional Technology WPMU will be open. Users will be able to have any of a 100 themes, content will be posted under CC license, plugins will be abundant, and it will hopefully be an organic community. BuddyPress might help to further the latter. My main concern is the ability to revert to a normal WPMU. If we decide BuddyPress is not what we want can we easily revert to plain WPMU by turning off the plugins? Guess it is time to load it up onto my Dreamhost account and do some testing.