New color palette, new Genericons and goodbye chat post formats

As I’m continuing to alter the default WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme via my own child theme on this site, most of my concern up to this point has been focused on post formats.

Though I like Twenty Thirteen’s bold colors and diversity of styles and formatting for every post format, I knew I wouldn’t be happy until I made it my own.

Colors

I have taken the original child theme I was using called Twenty Thirteen Blue  and changed all of the colors — here is what I have most recently settled on, for now:

spine-lower-swatch50-more

It’s such a large color palette because I wanted a distinct color for just about every post format.

Genericons

I’ve also added to the child theme’s CSS styles to ensure that every post format has its own Genericon, as selected from Automattic’s flexible icon font for blogs, which comes bundled with the Twenty Thirteen theme.

Here are the Genericons I am now using on this website:

genericons
Standard, aside, image, gallery, video, status, quote, link, art (chat), audio

Look for these Genericons on each post on the blog index pages and on the posts themselves. Find them near the article posted date.

To get each post format to display a different Genericon, I had to include variations of this CSS code in the stylesheet:

.format-chat .entry-meta .date a:before {
 content: 'f408';
 margin-right: 2px;
}

Not that chatty

I love WordPress post formats, as you can tell. It’s a great feature, and I can’t wait to continue to alter the template for each of these ten distinct taxonomies.

But I have no real use for the post format: Chat. I just don’t have any interest in sharing chats that I have with others on this blog, and if I did, I could still decide to select the Standard, Aside, Quote or Status post formats.

In its place, I wanted a different post format for Art. These types of posts will mainly contain images that are artistic, or — heh — at least not of the family or other usual subjects. Most, if not all, of the posts in this post format will be categorized as Art, though some posts in the art category may have different post formats like Aside, Image or Status.

To make this happen, I had to copy over one of Twenty Thirteen’s key functions concerning post formats and alter it in my child theme. Here’s the important part of what I came up with as I modified the twentythirteen_entry_date function:

if ( ! function_exists( 'twentythirteen_entry_date' ) ) :

function twentythirteen_entry_date( $echo = true ) {
if ( has_post_format( array( 'status', 'aside', 'audio', 'gallery', 'image', 'link', 'quote', 'video', ) ) )
$format_prefix = _x( '%1$s on %2$s', '1: post format name. 2: date', 'twentythirteen' );
else if ( has_post_format('chat') )
$format_prefix = 'Art on %2$s';
else
$format_prefix = '%2$s';

...

endif;

Where we are now

today-screenshot

Thoughts?

2 thoughts on “New color palette, new Genericons and goodbye chat post formats”

  1. Interesting. I say interesting b/c I really don’t understand all the technical stuff. But I do love the colors you’ve come up with!

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