• Installation / Upgrade Instructions

Chameleon is a combination theme and plugin for Geeklog v1.4.1+. The theme is a pure CSS based theme. One of the major hurdles for a pure CSS driven layout in Geeklog is Geeklog's ability to dynamically have 3, 2 or 1 set of columns display at any given time. This problem has been solved with the customized functions.php file included with Chameleon.

The benefits of using a pure CSS theme is that it is far easier to “theme” a site using CSS (just use a different CSS file) than using HTML tables. This is where the plugin side of Chameleon comes into play. Also, using a pure CSS driven layout, the content is always sent to the browser first, followed by the left / right columns. This means that mobile devices or systems that do not support style sheets will always see your site content first. This is also optimized for search engine friendliness as well.

The plugin allows the site administrator to choose from several different styles for four of the major areas of your site; page layout, menu, blocks, and colors. It also allows you to easily upload a new logo for your site, or use a text-only site name, and also toggle the visibility of the site slogan.

Keep in mind that the goal of Chameleon is to give an out-of-the-box solution to folks who want to setup Geeklog as their CMS and give them the ability to easily customize the look and feel without having to crack open the template or the style sheet.

There are 17 different page layouts to choose from, including 7 fluid width and 10 fixed width layouts.

There are 12 different horizontal menu options, along with the option to align the menu to the right or left.

There are 3 different block styles to choose from, with the ability to choose options independently for left and right blocks.

There are 8 different color schemes, 4 light and 4 dark, with dominant colors including Blue, Green, Purple, and Red.

This gives you over 88,128+ different styles you can achieve from a single theme simply by making selections from Chameleon's layout configurator. The benefit of the plugin is that you don't have to actually make any CSS changes, this is all done for you automatically.

Of course, if you want to go directly to the style sheet and templates to accomplish your design goals, there is no requirement that you use the plugin interface. The Chameleon theme is also bundled as a standard Geeklog theme that you can customize as you want.

We believe this is the first step in bringing Geeklog into the CSS/XHTML world. The next step will be to remove all the markup from the source code and get it into the templates. Once this is done, it will make it possible to move to XHTML which opens up additional opportunities for visual enhancements.

Chameleon requires Geeklog v1.4.1.

If you run the vThemes plugin, make sure you upgrade to vThemes v1.0.2 as it solves an issue with cookies which will show up when using Chameleon.

Once you have Chameleon installed, you can select the Chameleon option under Admins Only to configure your layout. Keep in mind, once you save your changes, you can only view how the changes affect your site by changing your theme to Chameleon in the My Account option of Geeklog.

You have the option of making Chameleon your default theme for Geeklog, to do this, edit Geeklog's config.php and modify the $_CONF['theme'] line to look like this:

$_CONF['theme']             = 'chameleon';