Renovatio the WordPress theme
You may see the word renovatio appear a few times on James' Blog, but may wonder what it is or is referring to. The truth is that the word renovatio is latin, and it means re-birth, but this is also the name of the WordPress theme that you see before you. Renovatio is the theme that appeared in 2009, replacing the older theme that had been used since the blog began in 2008. I kind of thought the word Renovatio fitted perfectly for the theme name because the new theme that I had designed was essentially giving James' Blog a jump into the new generation of blogs and also because the word itself, 'Renovatio' sounds kind of bad ass, and not everyone can pronounce it correctly! But the whole meaning of the latin word was mainly the reason behind the theme name.
Is Renovatio publicly avaliable?
People in the past have asked me if they can use the Renovatio WordPress theme, but because I have not released the theme publicly, I will not allow the theme to be used anywhere except James' Blog. I spent alot of time developing Renovatio, and although I'd love to share this theme with the world, the theme is very personal to me and makes James' Blog unique. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to make a tutorial on how to code and design your own wordpress theme.
Where does the theme name Renovatio come from?
Ok I admit it, Renovatio isn't exactly a common name for a website layout, but then again to be all cool and hip I decided to think of some weird but interesting name. I say interesting because Renovatio isn't just a name, it's actually a real word. Oh yes, in fact if your a person that stuided Latin at school then the word maybe familiar to you. Yes Renovatio is a latin word, and because now a days Latin isn't in the standard secondary school curriculum no one is going to know what it means. So thats what makes it weird and wonderful. Though I never learned Latin at school, admittedly I did get the idea of the theme name from a film called 'The Island' which was my favorite film of 2005. Without going into to much detail, the film the island is all about a guy called Dr. Merrick who owns Merrick Biotech which is organisation that produces clones, you know the whole American dream living forever, basically high class people pay this man to clone there DNA and then they breed clones in a controlled environment, but the clones aren't silly dumb people that are in containers all the time, they are actually living copies of there sponsors (The actual person they are a clone of) anyway before I start writing a wikipedia article about the film one of the main characters in the film (One of the many clones in the film) keeps having a recuring dream were by he and some woman are on a boat, they then get pulled under the water and as the character is about to drown in the dream he would wake up. Anyway the clone who is having this dream is called to Dr Merricks office for examination, he tells him to draw the boat that is in his dream. He draws the boat and writes the boats name which is renovatio. Through the film it is discovered that the word renovatio is latin and it stands for rebirth. So thats why Renovatio is the name of this WordPress theme! Quite fitting really as the whole rebirth meaning was suited well as I released the theme as the brand new 2009 look to replace the 2008 theme that had been used previously.
Credits/Thanks
Although I designed and coded the layout myself, I would like to take this oppurtunity to thank and credit various people for there help and providing scripts that are present on James' Blog
Comments Style (Fire Studios):
The comments style that you see at the end of each post and article was kindly donated by my good friend Fire G over at Fire Studios, he was even kind enough to help me intergrate into my template.
Rotating Banner script: (Dynamic Drive):
The fading in and out images that you see just below the header you know the latest tutorial etc images are powered by a script by Dynamic Drive, when I was designing the WordPress theme Renovatio I thought it would be a good idea to make sure visitors knew what the latest tutorial or latest article posts were. Thanks to Dynamic Drive I was able to create a slide show effect where images rotate displaying all sorts of content on James' Blog.
Click here to check out the rotating image script
Multi Level Navigation bar (Dynamic Drive):
I would like to thank Dynamic Drive for providing the code for the multi level navigation bar that you see below the header, I won't lie I have 0 knowledge of jQuery, but thanks to Dynamic Drive I was able to work it into the WordPress navigation code and create a multi level navigation which expands and organises my posts/articles and pages that are on James' Blog
Theme Colour changer (Dynamic Drive)
Yet again Dynamic Drive providing a small but effective script. One day I thought, well the whole colour scheme of James' Blog is blue, but what about visitors that don't like the colour blue, what if they liked green instead? Thanks to Dynamic Drive I managed to get hold of a script that will load different stylesheets over the default one set. In actual fact the Dynamic Drive script is coded to change the actual design of a website by loading in different stylesheets, but I tweaked it slighty so it simply loads certain attributes that change areas like the header and sidebar title bars to the colour chosen.
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