I’ve disliked the design I produced for this site pretty much since the day I launced it. It wasn’t so many things that I wanted it to be, but it was functional and so it stayed. But no more.

I have done what, a few short months ago would have been unthinkable: I have used a third-party theme instead of building my own.

It is unlikely the theme will stay intact for long. In-fact the CSS has already been changed a little to help modify the navigation and will probably change more in the coming weeks. I also need to change the colours from blue to purple, as purple is the colour I used before.

Seeking Testers

The navigation on this site operates using the Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin. So much of that plugin has changed recently so now it can do much much more. With that though comes responsibilities, so I am looking for a few people to test the new version.

But what does it do?

First of all I have added an option to calculate the number of tabs displayed according to height instead of width. This means opens up much more potential, something you will soon see on the home page of this site.

Secondly I have added an option which prevents the javascript redistributing some of the contents. This means that accordian tabs are now possible. I will also be including some of these on this site in due course.

Third: I have added a rotation feature that rotates through the tabs, and tab levels, displaying the contents of each one. There are 5 possible speeds.

Lasty, and most important by far, is the template option. The new version includes an option to load the CSS from a template. This means that you can offer your tab designs out to others to use. I will be producing some basic templates to begin with that people can use and modify.

I’m quite excited about this release, there is a little more work to go finishing some defaults, but it is nearly there.

If you are interested in testing out the latest version of the fun with sidebar tabs plugin then please drop a note in the comments (Wordpress 2.5+ is required).