The general layout of the new thelantern.com is done! I finished adding the required pages and creating the menus on Monday, and on Tuesday added the coloration CSS rules for the top navigation.

There was an interesting bug where individual story contents would not show in the individual-post pages. It turned out that the function do_sociable() wasn’t defined, and so the page was failing and aborting at that point. Because of this, sidebar and footer weren’t being sent to the browser. I fixed this by removing references to that plugin in the template.

Instead of Sociable, I’ve installed 2-Click Social Media Buttons, which protect reder privacy while still allowing sharing. I may change the plugin, though, because that plugin does not perform well when called twice on the same page. Chris Schwartz, who developed the WordPress theme for The Lantern, said that research shows that many people share the story before even finishing reading it, meaning that it’s good to have sharing buttons near the top.

I don’t like how the theme has a grey background and small text for the story, so next week, once I get the widget situation figured out, I’ll ask Dan and the design editor about making the story background white and the font bigger.