Protocol 7 » assorted musings on life, interaction, design, and beer

Oulipo Theme Release

– January 8th, 2009

screenshot of Oulipo

In April of 2008 I relaunched Protocol 7 with Oulipo, my personal variation on the black and white, grid-based design style. Over the months it was featured in a several galleries and I received a number of emails from people interested in using the theme on their own site. Now that I’ve redesigned Protocol 7, Oulipo is ready for its public debut.

Though Oulipo was quietly released about a week ago, I didn’t want to make an announcement until it was accepted to the WordPress Themes directory. Weblog Tools Collection posted the theme on January 5th, and since then Oulipo has been popping up on a few blogs. This is the first time I’ve released a personal design and it makes me incredibly happy to see it being used.

I’ve made a few changes to the original design, namely adding support for sticky posts and threaded comments that arrived with WordPress 2.7. I’ve also removed the custom archive template for Oulipo because it requires some fiddling and doesn’t work out of the box. Additionally, the custom template relies on a slightly modified version of Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives. If you’d like to use the custom archive for Oulipo, the template and modified plug-in can be downloaded here. Instructions on installing and configuring the plug-in can be found on Justin’s Smart Archives page. Please note, I’m providing these files as-is and do not plan on providing support for these additions.

If you like a clean, minimalist look, Oulipo might be for you. View the Oulipo demo or just go ahead and download version 1.0.

  1. kOoLiNuS says:
    January 9, 2009 at 4:40 am

    You gave us a wonderful theme and no one has passed by and say thanks ???

    Well, I’ll do it then, since your Oulipo has just reached the 1st position of my ranks in the restyle of my 6-years-old italian blog:

    THANK YOU

    ;-)

    Reply
  2. Daus says:
    January 9, 2009 at 7:04 pm

    Thanks for the archive template!

    Reply
  3. JR (abcdetc) says:
    January 9, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    I looked for a theme to change my blog … and go into my own domain !
    I fond it here
    MERCI

    Reply
  4. Izzy says:
    January 16, 2009 at 1:46 am

    Is there any way to have this theme ported to Tumblr? I’m currently using your wonderful Wakalixes theme, but would love to have the automatic large initial in this theme.

    Reply
    • pnts says:
      January 21, 2009 at 4:21 pm

      Hi Izzy,

      I hadn’t even thought of porting Oulipo to Tumblr, but now that you mention it I’m adding that to the list of things to do on a rainy day. In the interim, here is the style that Ouplio uses to make the first letter larger, in addition to the caps for the first line. This *should* work for Wakalixes, at least for text entries:

      .entry > p:first-child:first-letter {
	font-size: 2em;
}

.entry > p:first-child:first-line {
	font-variant: small-caps;
	font-size: 1.3em;
}

      Reply
  5. Pedro Pablo says:
    January 17, 2009 at 11:32 pm

    Really very ver beautiful theme!. Thanks very much fot this release, and congratulations for the good and nice work

    Reply
  6. Doug says:
    February 3, 2009 at 1:18 am

    Beautiful theme, thank you very much!

    Reply
  7. Jordi Luque says:
    February 9, 2009 at 6:35 am

    Dear Andrea,

    Thank you very much for Oulipo, an amazing theme. I’m using it in my personal sie. It works perfect as a blog and, with some minor tweaks, it had become a great portfolio.

    Thanks again!

    Reply
  8. Doug says:
    February 11, 2009 at 1:11 am

    Andrea, I have a question on something I’ve seen on your blog. How do yo make the backlinks on the footnotes? Is it a plugin or is it hardcoded?

    Cheers,

    Reply
  9. Joel Helin says:
    February 12, 2009 at 7:38 am

    This is wonderfull. I’ve always loved that layout.

    Reply
  10. Jacob Sam-La Rose says:
    February 17, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    Hey Andrea– just wanted to say thanks for releasing the theme. I’d admired the styling of Protocol 7 for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the template was available.

    Reply
    • pnts says:
      February 22, 2009 at 3:35 pm

      Jacob, I’m really happy to hear you are using Oulipo. When I first designed it, the main purpose of the theme was to showcase the written word. When I hear of poets, typographers, and playwrights using Oulipo, I just grin from ear to ear.

      Reply
  11. Dave says:
    February 26, 2009 at 12:51 pm

    Thanks so much for releasing the theme! I was all set to go with a different minimalist theme last night when I stumbled across Oulipo – maybe not everyone’s choice for a video blog, but the apportionment of whitespace is perfect. I was also very impressed by the typography. I’m glad to hear that other poets have been using it, too.

    Reply
  12. Jordi Luque says:
    March 18, 2009 at 8:13 am

    Been tweaking it a little…
    Twitter for Wordpress it’s been replaced by statuspress, showing status updates from facebook.
    Font family, although I loved it, it’s been changed to Baskerville & serif, inspired by Jon Tangerine’s blog.
    Background color set to a pale grey & masthead and hovered links to red.
    Worked out a special navigation sidebar for the portfolio area.
    Localized in spanish.

    Reply
  13. adsimple says:
    May 9, 2009 at 8:40 pm

    Man, amazing theme. What should I use to edit it a little bit?

    Thanks again!

    Reply
    • pnts says:
      May 10, 2009 at 2:07 am

      Glad you like it :) To edit it, use a text editor (not a word processor!) such as NotePad or SimpleText. If you have a program like Dreamweaver, that would work too. I have a Mac, and use a text editor called TextMate to do all my editing with. Hope this helps.

      Reply
  14. Eru says:
    June 10, 2009 at 7:51 pm

    Yep, I love your Oulipo theme, I used it on my current blog (with minor ongoing modification)

    It’s a beautiful theme, thank you so much Andrea :)

    Reply
  15. liangbolo says:
    December 7, 2009 at 7:46 am

    Your site is elegant……
    I love it.

    Reply
  16. Jonathan Poritsky says:
    December 31, 2009 at 8:43 am

    I love love love love love the Oulipo theme. I’d been searching forever for a theme to redo my website with and this theme is just miles ahead of anything out there for people who want their writing to take center stage. I just took the new site live with a tweaked version of Oulipo:

    http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/12/30/new-design-the-what-the-how-the-why/

    I wanted to recommend to everyone the Smart Archives Reloaded plugin which is a simplified version of Justin Blanton’s plugin. I was fiddling with the original for awhile before I discovered the newer one, which is configurable from within WP.

    One thing I couldn’t figure out was how to change the background of the entire page. I changed the color of almost everything, except there was still white to the right and left of the sidebars. Not sure what I’m missing. But I loved the white on black look enough I went live without figuring it out. Maybe when I do I’ll change again.

    Thank you for making this. I really love it.

    Reply
    • pnts says:
      January 1, 2010 at 1:58 pm

      Hey Jonathan,

      I’m so happy to hear that you like Oulipo! Thanks for the extremely useful update on the Smart Archives reloaded plugin. I’m hoping to get around to some needed updates to Oulipo in 2010, and will incorporate the plugin for archives.

      To change the entire background you’ll need to edit the CSS property for the background element and change it to #000. And be sure to change the font-color to something lighter like #EEE. Something like:

      body { background: #000; color: #eee; }

      Let me know if you run into any issues :)

      Reply
      • Jonathan Poritsky says:
        January 11, 2010 at 6:37 am

        Found it! I’d been trying that every which way but it never worked, but I found out what was confusing it. I’m not sure if this was one of my tweaks or in your original file, but under Typography there was a setting for “body, .delicious-desc{…”. There was a background field there pointing to #FFF. I removed it, moved a body{ } up to the global section and voila, all better.

        The only other tweak I made was that I added a few more sidebars. One on the header and one on posts. I hope I don’t litter your theme too much, I just like the sidebars for their customizability down the line.

        While we’re conversing… ;) Know of an easy way to prepend text to specific posts. I’d like to integrate about 120 posts from an older site into my blog, but with a disclaimer of sorts informing their lineage. Haven’t found anything clean and simple, and that seems to be your bag. If you know anything for that, love to hear. Thanks again.

        Reply
        • Christiane says:
          January 13, 2010 at 4:47 pm

          I input what the code you gave him and also followed his instructions, but I cannot seem to get any of the font colors to change into white. I’ve manually input the color code for white, and the links, the text, etc. remain black. Any suggestions?

          Reply
  17. jason says:
    January 14, 2010 at 12:37 pm

    I am having problems just changing the color of my post titles, could you point me to the right part of your stylesheet?

    Reply
  18. Bhomatude says:
    January 15, 2010 at 6:29 am

    I switched over to Oulipo last month and love the design – simple, clean and elegant. I’ve been able to tweak it here and there so that it works with my content, but two things I haven’t been able to figure out:

    I changed the justification of the main_nav to right.:

    #main_nav {
    width: 9.7em;
    margin: 4em 0 0 0;
    float: right;
    display: inline;
    position: fixed;
    text-align: right;
    padding-right: 10px;
    }

    But the padding-right attribute has no effect. I need a bit more space between the border and text when the page is hovered and selected.

    The other thing I can’t figure out is related:

    #main_nav a:hover, .current_page_item, .current {
    width: 100%;
    border-right: 6.7px solid #EEE;
    color: #1f496f;

    The color attribute I added works fine on hover, but does not remain like the border for the current page. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    Reply
  19. Bhomatude says:
    January 15, 2010 at 4:50 pm

    Just figured out the padding issue — I was dropping in the attribute in the wrong section! Still working on the text color change for current page.

    Reply
  20. naomi says:
    January 25, 2010 at 7:51 am

    AWESOME theme. The fonts are great and the style is perfect in its minimalistic approach. Quick question. . .I would like to add a tag at the very top above the dotted line, next to the search bar. Can you let me know how I do that? Lastly, how can I change the blog title to my own logo? Thanks for any direction given.

    Reply
  21. Paul Gero says:
    February 3, 2010 at 11:38 pm

    I’m loving Oulipo…elegant and clean design. Thank you for posting it…using it on my photo blog.

    Paul

    Reply
  22. Elizabeth Yalkut says:
    February 20, 2010 at 6:29 pm

    I’m in love with Oulipo; not only does the name appeal to my lit-geek self, it’s gorgeous and flexible. One of these days, in my copious spare time, I’ll get around to a few tweaks, like the line-height of text and the like, but it’s so good out of the box that it’s not high on my to-do list.

    Reply

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