UPDATE: The latest versions of the Carrington themes are available on Google Code.

Please download from the themes page.

Here are the changes of note:

• Made the lightbox gallery feature compatible with WordPress 2.8 (specifically, with the included jQuery 1.3).
• Reduce the size of some included images.
• Removed page template names from page templates in the pages/ directory due to a bug in WordPress 2.8 that would show them as selectable but would not use them.
• Updated to Carrington Core 2.4.
• A patch for backward compatibility with older versions of WordPress.

The download, as always, is available from the themes page.

In his presentation, Steve outlined a number of things that could be changed with the Carrington Blog theme to improve site load time. It’s unfortunate that Steve was using version 1.3 of this theme as most of the changes he recommends were already addressed in Carrington Blog 2.0, however there were a few things that we’ve been able to improve based on his notes.

We’ll have these enhancements included in a maintenance release of Carrington Blog in the near future (or grab them from the public SVN anytime).

Version 2.0 has been aging like a fine wine since the beta release in early March. In that time, features have been refined, bugs have been fixed, documentation has been improved, and a variety of other enhancements have been made.

Here is a run-down of the changes from 1.x to 2.0:

Threaded Comments

WordPress 2.7 threaded comments support. Threading and comment form JS also works when comments are pulled via AJAX. WordPress 2.7 paginated comments are also supported.

Customizable Colors

Ever wished you could easily customize the color of the links or change the header color to match your brand? Carrington Blog now supports easy color customization for all the main theme elements through simple color pickers on the settings page.

There is a built-in preview feature as well, so you can check your changes before you make them live.

Customizable Header Image

Personalize the header with your own custom background image. You can choose an image from the media gallery to be used as your header image.

Lightboxes

Image galleries can optionally be loaded through a Lighbox script. This lets you load your galleries straight into the page via AJAX!

Attachments

Attachment (image) galleries have been abstracted into the framework: you can now take advantage of Carrington’s elegant theme conventions for galleries too.

Optional Images

• Background images are now abstracted into a separate stylesheet. You can choose to exclude them for a simple, stripped-down look.
• More efficient typography.css with fewer lines.
• A more effective reset, based on Eric Meyer’s famous code.
• Improved display of HTML when CSS is disabled, improving your site’s accessibility.
• IE6 layout hardening against certain content-related bugs. This should fix things for the users that experienced problems with dropping sidebars under certain content conditions.

Misc.

• Better internationalization.
• Fixed logout errors associated with 2.7′s nonce tokens. WordPress 2.7 introduced a special unique key that has to be passed in order to successfully log out. Carrington’s logout functions have been updated to take advantage of this, while still remaining backwards-compatible.
• Category descriptions are now shown at the top of category archives.
• Fixed a styling issue with the ShareThis plugin.
• Informational comments added to compatibility files (style.css, index.php, 404.php, etc) to help theme developers.
• Improved documentation.

Enjoy!

This release has a variety of new features, including:

• Threaded comments.
• Lightboxes for image galleries.
• Customizable colors.
• Selectable custom header images.
• Simplified CSS and more efficient CSS delivery.
• Updated and improved README files (also available online).

There is a little more we plan to add before the official 2.0 release, but we wanted to get this out for feedback and bug reports before we package up the official 2.0 release.

The download link is available on the Themes page.

This site has been updated, of course, as an example.

Upgrading is strongly recommended due to a security patch in this release.

This version has a couple of changes – both bug fixes and new features:

• Added an image.php file for displaying media. This is not yet abstracted into the framework, but will be in the future.
• Added a field to the settings page for adding in analytics code.
• Fixed a problem with IE7 and the dropdown menus.
• Explicitly send headers with AJAX responses, hopefully fixes some issues reported by Safari users.
• Added a Log In link to the header.
• Added code to load in translations.
• Updated documentation.

Enjoy! Let us know in the forums if you run into trouble.

It’s been great seeing developers picking up the Carrington theme framework and using it. We wanted to get these fixes and features out ASAP as a result.

This version has a couple of changes – both bug fixes and new features:

• Added support for meta-{key}.php content templates (previously supported only meta-{key}-{value}.php templates) as requested.
• Added a field for entering the About text that is shown in the sidebar. If this is present, the /about page content is not used. The content of this field is passed through regular WordPress filters for formatting, etc.
• Fixed a layout bug with comment links.
• Adjusted some header tag spacing.
• Abstracted all general templates (header, sidebar, etc.) – this was not working completely in 1.1.
• Updated documentation.

Enjoy! Let us know in the forums if you run into trouble.

Version 1.1.11.2 should be out shortly. We’ve installed it here for testing so if you see anything that doesn’t look right, let us know in the comments.

Thanks for your help.

This contains some nice new features and some bug fixes from the 1.0 release:

• There is now a setting to allow you to set how many posts should appear on the archives pages (seperately from the home page).
• Added parent-{page-slug}.php support to enable custom content display for sub-pages.
• Support cat-{slug}.php, etc. template support throughout all top level directories (header, footer, sidebar, etc.).
• Some IDs were converted to CLASSes to remove in-page ID conflicts (due to AJAX loading of templates).
• Improved ShareThis compatibility with AJAX archives loading.
• Firefox 2 compatibility for drop-down menus.

Problems, questions or suggestions? Try the documentation and the forums.