You will have to edit 3 files in your theme:

Functions.php

In functions.php, add the following code under the existing widget code:
if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘name’ => ‘Mimbo Footerbar1′,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”clearfloat”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));

if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘name’ => ‘Mimbo Footerbar2′,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”clearfloat”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));

if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘name’ => ‘Mimbo Footerbar3′,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”clearfloat”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));

Footer.php

In the footer.php file, add the following code right under the footer div definition:

Style.css

Now, all you have to do is edit your style.css files to add the appropriate styling to the footers.  This is the css code that I have used to get you started.

#footerbar {
        display:block;
        clear:both;
margin-top:-10px;
list-style-type: none;
list-style-image: none;
margin-bottom:15px;
}
 
#footerbar ul {
padding-left: 15px;
}
 
#footerbar h3 {
        color:#dadada;
        font-family: 'Tempus Sans ITC','Bradley Hand ITC','Comic Sans MS','Zapf-Chancery', cursive;
        font-size: 18px;
	letter-spacing:0.15em;
border:none;
margin:0px;
}
 
#footerbar h3.widgettitle {
        color:#dadada;
border:none;
}
 
#footerbar a {
display:block;
}
 
#footerbar1 {
        float: left;
margin-right:10px;
        }
 
#footerbar2 {
        float: left;
        }
 
#footerbar3 {
        float: right;
margin-left:5px;
        }		
 
#footerbar1, #footerbar2, #footerbar3 {
width:32%;
}

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I love blogs with interesting footers.  In a typical blog, the footer describes the bottom of the website below the dynamic content and sidebars.  This area often does not receive the attention it deserves and is often used only for copyright information or some navigation links.  

I believe that a well designed footer can greatly increase a blog’s functionality and visual appeal.  Consequently when rating Wordpress themes, I give more importance to those that allow you to customize footers easily by using footer widgets.  Footers can be used in a variety of ways.

Some of the ways footers can be used

Links to important posts, pages:  This will help expose sections of your blog that need more visitors.  I have read that this also helps in SEO (although how much is debatable).  Take a look at the footer of mint.com.  I am sure that all those key words and phrases have to be adding positive SEO value to their website.

Guide your visitors to their next destination: Users reaching the end of the content on a particular page are usually itching to find something else to browse.  Unless you provide them fresh content they might just jump to another website.  If nothing else, just put a PPC ad over there.  Google link units are another option but they can look ugly. 

Affiliate links & advertisements to your own products (and other blogs): It can be argued that a high percentage of viewers who have read your blog till the bottom of the page are interested in what you have to say and would be easiser to sell to.  Take a look at the above footer snapshot from Problogger.com.  Renowned blogger Darren Rowse uses his footer to list his ‘Recommended Money Makers’ which probably contain affiliate links.  Since he blogs about blogging and has a popular ‘making money through blogging’ section, these links are a perfect fit for his website.  

Visitors that like the look of your website often look in the footer for theme attributions.  If you use a premium theme that has an affiliate program, you should definately enroll and include an affiliate link to the theme in the footer.  A short positive review of the premium theme is also recommended.

Stash content that you need on every page but does not have to be immediately visible:  This may include reciprocal links to blog directories and other links that help to promote your own blog.  Also, a contact form can be included here as visitors that want to contact you will usually make an effort to look around for the form. 

Improve your blog’s looks: Most blog footers load last and so do not interfere with the accessibility with the rest of the blog’s content.  This means that all that cool art and images that you have been hesitating to put on your blog because you fear increased load times can go in the footer (Ofcourse this does not mean you do not web optimize the images.)  If done in the right way, this can do wonders in adding personality to your blog. 

Conclusion

I am really glad the theme I am using currently for this blog came with footer widgets.  This helped me get started with using the footer effectively before I learned how to customize footers myself.  Unfortunately, the Mimbo 3.0 theme I recently switched Recipe Mobile to did not come with footer widgets.  I will try to add these myself over the weekend and will post details on this blog.  Eventually, I would also love to add some image elements there (if somebody would only help me with the art!)

Have you used footer on your blog in interesting ways or have seen it done on any other blog?  Do you believe that footers should get the same attention as sidebars and mastheads?  

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This article is part of an ongoing series where I share my experiences with modifying Recipe Mobile to use the Mimbo theme.  You can see the related articles here.

Introduction

In this article, I will show you how to change the hover states of important objects in your Mimbo theme.  These include:

1. The page navigation bar link hover color
2. The category bar link hover color
3. The hover effect of the lead story background
4. The default link hover colors

These items are indicated in the picture below

Change the hover color of the page navigation bar links

Add the following code to your child theme ’style.css’ file’ to change the color:

#nav a:hover {
color:#FFF !important;
}

Change the hex code after color: to your preference.

Change the default hover color for all the links in the page

Add the following code to use a different default color for the hover state of the links on your website:

a:hover, a:active {
color:#1E771E;
text-decoration:underline;
}

Notice that in my code, I have maintained the same color as the hover state for the link active state as well.  If you do not wish to do the same, remove the a:active reference (don’t forget to remove the ‘,’ before it) from the above code before pasting it into your stylesheet.  Change the hex color code after color: to your preference.

Remove the hover color change effect from the lead story background

I find the lead story background color change effect that comes as default with the Mimbo theme distracting and a bit tacky.  To remove this effect,  add the following code to your child theme ’style.css’ file.

#lead:hover {
 
background:#E36666;
 
}

Change the hex code after background: to match the color in your non hover state.  What I am basically doing here is changing the code between the parenthesis in my #lead:hover reference to match the code in my #lead reference.

Change the category bar title hover color

To change the hover color in the category titles in the ‘cat-nav’ bar, use the following code in your child theme:

#nav-cat a:hover, #nav-cat a:active {
color:#1E771E !important;
}

Notice that in my code, I have maintained the same color for the link active state as well.  If you do not wish to do the same, remove the #nav-cat a:active reference (don’t forget to remove the ‘,‘ before it) from the above code before pasting it into your stylesheet.  Change the color to your preference.

Conclusion

That takes care of most of the hover state design changes I made.  Do let me know if you think anything is missing or if you would like specific help with any of these or other design changes.

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Making parent theme modifications: This is the first part of the posts where I detail what parent theme modifications I made to the Mimbo theme.  Future posts are pending.

Modifications using the child theme:  This is the first part in the series of posts where I show what modifications can be made using a child theme.  Part 2 of the child theme changes deal with modifications of the hover state of theme items.  Other posts that deal with modifying the child theme are still to come

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This article is part of an ongoing series where I share my experiences with modifying Recipe Mobile to use the Mimbo theme.  You can see the related articles here.

Introduction

I apologize for the delay.  I work on many project at the same time and though most of the updates to the new Recipe Mobile website are in place, I have not had a chance to publish details in this blog as I had said I would.

Anyway, here is a start.  The last article in the Modifying the Mimbo theme series dealt with making certain changes to the index.php & header.php template files in the parent theme itself.  Now, this section is the first that will talk about modifications that can be made using a child theme.  I have already written about the advantages of styling Wordpress blogs using child themes and today I will show you how.

While the functionality of the Mimbo theme is great, I am not a fan of the greyish tones used in it by default.  The first theme I used on the Recipe Mobile website had a strong red background with green elements.  Initially, I was unsure that it would look good, but Deepa loved it and so I let it be.  Eventually, it grew on me andI realized it gave the website a unique look.  I wanted some continuity by maintaining a similar color scheme after the theme change. For that I had to change the colors of several elements of the Mimbo theme.  

In this article, I will be focusing on the major areas, where changing the color completely changed the look of the theme.  These areas are:

1. The website background
2. The category bar background, and 
3. The lead story background.

The below image is a snapshot of the Mimbo 3.0 theme demo.  The areas I will be talking about are indicated.

How to change the website background color

Considering how different the new Mimbo theme is from the old theme, using a the same red color for the new back ground was one of the ways I could maintain some continuity across the theme change.

The original Mimbo theme has a drab grey background colour that might not suit many websites.  You can change it easily by copying the following code into your child theme

body {
 
background:#C60001
 
}

Change the hex code after background: to correspond to the color you want.  This will override the background colour instructions in the parent theme.

How to change the category bar background color

Green was the other color that I wanted to transfer over from the old theme and the prominent category bar in the Mimbo theme seemed like the appropriate place to use it.  The way to do this is to add the following code to your child theme.

#nav-cat {
 
background:#7DA939 !important;
 
}

Again, change the hex code for your color preference.

How to change the lead story background color

The lead story section is one of the more interesting features of the Mimbo theme and I really like the way it is designed.  However, I felt that the original gray color was not standing out enough.  Originally, I decided to colour it the same red as the website background but that was too strong and I finally settled for a lighter shade of red (closer to pink).  I am still undecided about this but I have kept it here for now.  I would love to hear your comments about this choice of color. 

Here is how you can change the background of the lead story:

#lead {
	background:#E36666;
	border-bottom:3px solid #E36666;
	border-right:3px solid #E36666;
	}

Copy the above code into the child theme.  Change the hex code after background: to the color of your choice.  Notice that this code also changes the border colors of the lead story box.  You can change this if you like.

Conclusions

Please let me know if you found the above instructions helpful, if there are any errors and if you think I can provide any additional details.  I would love to answer any questions you might have.

This takes care of the background colors for some of the major sections of the theme.  In the next post of the series I will publish how the hover colors and effects can be changed to fit into the rest of the color scheme.  

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Luckily, Darren provides a child theme called Vintage Green on the same download page to help get started.  Installing a child theme is similar to installing a regular Wordpress theme.  You unzip and upload the theme folder to your ‘wp-content/themes’ folder and activate it from Appearance-Themes on your Wordpress dashboard.  Make sure the parent theme folder is also present in the themes folder. (Note: The child theme folder does not go into the parent theme folder but within the Themes folder itself.)  The child theme contains references to its parent theme already so every thing should happen smoothly

I have been customizing Mimbo using a child theme for only a few hours now and have already seen the benefits of using a child theme.  The only code changes that I have had to make in the parent themes files were to:

Increase the number of ‘Recent Posts’ from 4 to 10

This was done easily by modifying the index.php file (in the parent theme) and changing the maximum post count from 4 to 10.  This is the modified code that you would use:

  elseif( $postcount > 0 && $postcount <= 10 )

Prevent duplication of content between ‘Featured Categories’ and ‘Recent Posts’

This can be partly achieved by modifying the index.php file to exclude posts from the featured categories from displaying in the Recent Posts timeline (which is really the main timeline that shows up in most blogs).  The code for this is:

if (in_category('33') && is_home() ) continue;

Add the above code above the <div class=”clearfloat recent-excerpts”> line.  Make sure it is contained within php tags.  This works well if your posts are usually categorized only in one category.  However, since many of the recipes belong to several categories, this method is not a 100% effective for me.  I am still trying to find a better solution to the problem.

Removing certain categories from the category navigation bar under the page title

The category navigation bar is one of the most prominent parts of the Mimbo theme.  I edited the wp_list_categories code in the header.php file to exclude the categories that were already in the featured categories section.  The code is now wp_list_categories(’exclude=1,26,33,31,30&title_li=’);

You can replace the numbers between ‘exclude’ and ‘&’ with the category ids you want to exclude.

Removing the date display from the lead/sticky post

Considering the post that is featured at the top of all the others in the Mimbo theme is not necessarily the latest, I did not see the point of having its date visible.  This was easily achieved by removing the code displaying the date from the index.php template file.  Removing the  the_time(’n/d/y’); tag before the the_excerpt(); in the lead sticky post section will achieve this result.

Conclusion

And that’s it.  All other changes were made using the child theme.  I probably will also add a carousel as well as footer widgets to the website and will publish details about those changes to this post when I do.  Please subscribe to my posts by RSS or email to get the latest updates.

Continuing the series, read about the changes I made to the Mimbo theme using a child theme.  

Please let me know if any of the instructions above are not clear.  I would love to know the results you are able to achieve.

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