Monday must be BANS WordPress Theme Day!
Dialectio for WordPress and Build a Niche Store!
This theme is actually very cool and if you spend a little time with it, you can really make it your own and it works with almost ANY type of site!
The BANS Theme is nothing but 3-4 files that calls the information from the Free WordPress Dialectio Theme available from the folks at Design Disease! They actually have several other templates that I am working on right now as well and for those interested in the Christmas shopping season, they have a GREAT Xmas theme that I will have completed by tomorrow afternoon!
I encourage everyone to play around with all the design elements of this theme, it really is a fun theme to work with!
The theme is setup using layout 4, but with a little playing around, you can probably get any of the other layout options to work just fine. Click here to see it in action. Click here to view install instructions.
The WordPress side of this theme must be downloaded above, I do not provide any of those file. After you have them, you can purchase the BANS theme code for $29.00 by clicking the link below.
Download BANS Files for this Theme
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Convert Almost ANY WordPress Theme to a BANS Template
- Just Another Work in Progress – BANS Theme for WordPress
- New BANS WordPress Theme almost ready for Release!
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Hey Mark,
This is a great theme, and the same one we use on our blog. Lots of flexibility and power. Not to mentioned the mark up is nice and clean. I can imagine that this theme would be awesome with a BANs integration.
That one looks quite nice. Does anyone know how to make the swirly patterns? I see them on a lot of sites, is there a photoshop plugin?
Cheers,
Duane.
@ Elijah -
Very cool!! I love the theme… its very non-bloggish in design.
@ Duane – its a background image and the content was centered over the top of it.
Mark
Mark, yeah I know it’s a background image! I was talking about how to make the swirly patterns.
Cheers,
Duane.
LOL Sorry Duane!
I assume they used a brush or something like that with either FireWorks or Photoshop.
There are ALOT of free resources for textures, shapes and brushes etc that do those types things automatically in high end graphics apps.
Mark
Mark,
Is this the theme you were talking about to use on my All Natural Stone Site?
Rick
@ Rick -
It is… Obviously, there would need to be some color changes to make it look more “Marblish” but it would be a great starting point.
A few quick filters on the colors to make it more gray/black and you would have a great stone looking site.
Mark
Well,
I just finished my first integration on Sunday! I am planning on doing a write up tonight.
This one is great if you have a car themed site!
(I will of course offer the integration files free of charge)
Just click the link to preview the template.
Chuck
Yippee! A non-BANS-looking theme!! I’m so excited, can’t wait for more. Especially Christmas – I have several Christmas sites and there is a very poor selection of ready-made themes out there. Really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. :-)
@ Chuck – GREAT Job!! Way to take a theme and convert it over!
Mark
Cheers Mark, I’ll do a search for some custom brushes.
Duane.
Slow down man. Everytime you give us one of these themes I have to make a site. When do I sleep. ?
@ Bill –
I hear ya!! I ran out of my own sites to use for developing the themes! LOL
@ Duane –
I have seen one place several times and cannot find it now. As soon as I do, I will repost.
Mark
@Mark –
OK, so I’m hopelessly lost in setting this one up and have really screwed things up. I understand the prt about having WP and BANS AND the generic Dilectio theme up and running before installing any of the special files you created, but I still can’t get it right.
Do I understand correctly that the files that in other themes used to be in the root directory (inc-bans-sidebar.php, inc-bans-header.php, inc-bans-footer.php, and parthvar.php are now in the themes/dilectio folder??
Is pathvar.php and pathvars.php supposed to be the same file (you refer to both in the writeup)? Where do these files go? In your instructions you say in your download /themes/dilectio/ there are “2 new files for the theme” but then you list 5…
For some reason when I followed the instructions I ended up with a file structure that looked like:
wp-content/themes/dilectio/dilectio
and of course nothing worked. I have WP set up on the root of this site. Please help!!
@Mark –
If you have run out of sites to develop themes on, I got a bunch for you to play with! ;-)
@ Alice -
Please post your site…. so we can see the issues.
Sorry about the typos in the install. pathvar is supposed to be pathvars. I also updated the file to reflect 5 files in the theme folder versus 2.
If you have 2 dilectio folders, you have an extra! I suspect this was theme that had a folder inside a folder with the download.
Yes, you understand correctly that some files previously in the root are now in the theme folder. This was done in case you wish to have more than one custom theme on a site. I realized you have to overwrite existing files if you swapped out.
Mark
OK, everything is installed – I had to use another domain because Hostgator needs to scrub out all the old files on the site above.
the one this that’s missing in the instructions is getting the theme into the BANS side of it. Maybe I took too many Stupid pills this morning, but when I got done setting up all the transferred files there was no Dilectio in the BANS side. I’m uploading it now, then I’ll move the special files in it.
Looks good! Now I’m going to change all the colors and graphics. :) That is, after I move all my ePN sites to PJ…
Hi Mark, I’ve used this theme on my website. I think that it’s pretty good, but for some reason I’ve had to copy two folders wp-content and wp-includes to both my /root (where bans is) and /blog (where wordpress is) folders. I’ve also had to copy a couple of files wp-setting.php and wp-config.php to each.
Now my coding knowledge is worse than zero – because I know a little and that little bit could be dangerous – LOL!
Dumb question alert… Could you give me any hints where I need to edit code to call for info from just the one copy of these files and then ditch the rest?
Cheers, Simon
I think this one site of mine is cursed. After all the trouble I had installing on my one site, I ended up trashing the whole thing and needed HG tech support to wipe it all away so I could start fresh. In the meantime I installed this theme on another site with no problems.
So today I want go back to my original site and try again, and what do you know its being a pain. I installed all of the BANS, WP, and Dilectio files and plugins, but not Marks special integrator script yet. I wanted to check everything out to make sure its working.
The BANS side looks good, but here’s what I get on the WP side. I don’t know where it thinks it needs to find http://www.www.domainname.com, but that’s what its doing and I can’t find where to fix it!!
Hope someone can point me in the right direction.
http://www.ilovehalloweenonline.com
Alice
@ Alice -
In your pathvars.php file, you have the wrong domain. Your stylesheet is pointing to:
Notice the twin http://www.www. in the url?
Just to be sure, it sounds like you have not installed any files yet. So you made this error during the site setup. If you can login to your admin, it is located on the preferences tab, if not, you may need to hard code the change into the mysql database, or uninstall wordpress and start again. Whichever is easiest for you.
Mark
Thanks Mark. But I can’t find the file that has < link rel=” stylesheet” href=”http://www.www.ilovehalloweenonline.com/wp-content/themes/default/style.css ” in it…
This istall was just the generic bans, wp, and dilecto files. Then I tested each one to make sure they worked so when I discovered this error I didn’t go on to install the bans/wp files. I can’t log into admin at all.
There shouldn’t be anything on the server with http://www.www in it – HG tech support wiped clean everything in this domain so there shouldn’t be any residual bad files from my attempts yesterday. Also, I created a brand new db in my-sql just in case.
So is there anything I can edit in file manager or ftp to fix this? And which file do I fix it in?
Thanks!
@ Alice -
If you open your site in a browser and view the source code, you will see the errors within the code of the pages.
At some process during the setup of the domain, either through fantastico or through your own edit, the extra www. was put in place.
When the site was installed first, were you able to login to the admin? yoursite. com/wp-admin?
If yes, did you set permalinks and options to add the www. to the site url?
If no, you need to contact HG support and explain the issue, its a Fantastico error and you fantastico will likely need to be reloaded to your account.
If yes – you DID set the url and permalinks… you made a typo and included an extra www in the url.
in order to fix it yourself, you have to get into the mysql database and fix the options table reference to your url, or scrap the wordpress install through fantastico and start again.
Just to reiterate, this is NOT a file issue, it is a settings issue in the database. Looking in the source code of the files just shows the error.
Mark
@ Mark –
It seems to have been several things… yes, I was in Permalinks and its ossible I added an extra www. But because I know I have a tendency to do this, I try to be really careful. Then, once the HG tech got into the db, he discovered some other things that were wrong even after he fixed the www. problem. So he fixed those, gave me YET ANOTHER pw for this thing, and I got it to open. But the connections between BANS and WP aren’t working – I can see the links on each site but they’re not clickable. So I’ll reinstall those files and see if it straightens up.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that, given the topic of this site, it’s cursed…
BWAAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Is it my imagination or is there no store search box?? The only one seems to be the one for the blog. How can I add a store/ebay search box??
Thanks!
Mark…I have a question related to search…..you know a few of my sites that are using WP/BANS…the store search box is almost useless.
It has “Store” as the default but this returns no results. If you click on the dropdown box to select a category or even “all categories” then it works fine.
Where can I modify that search box to always default to all categories unless someone changes it?
Mark, your search mod that i used to put on my sites to show “popular search phrases” will that mod work with these WP/BANS templates?
Thanks
@ Bill –
Shoot me one of the links via the contact form… I do know exactly what you are talking about with the cat issue… and have been testing a few different solutions.
@ Jeff -
It should work fine, but will need to be modified depending on the site and blog location.
Mark
Done.
I installed this with BANS on the root and wp in a folder, got everything uploaded and set up, and I get these messages:
Warning: require_once(/home/greatest/public_html/mymarykayshop/wp-content/themes/dilectio/pathvars.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/greatest/public_html/mymarykayshop/themes/dilectio/header.php on line 5
Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/home/greatest/public_html/mymarykayshop/wp-content/themes/dilectio/pathvars.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/greatest/public_html/mymarykayshop/themes/dilectio/header.php on line 5
Could it be confused about where the pathvars file is supposed to be? I changed the names in the file to reflect which was the blog and which the bans store, but I don’t know…
Is there a way to add a custom header to this template, and if so, where do I upload it and does any extra coding need to be done?
I created a little header with some graphics that fit around the other stuff already in this space, and want it to superimpose over the page tabs and site name without covering these up. I made the whole header file transparent, except for the pics that are spaced around where the site name and tabs are now.
First of all, will this work? Second, what file do I upload it to? Third, is there any code that needs to be added anywhere and if so, what and where. I just can’t stand the boring header and have to do something about it!
Thanks!
Alice,
For the header you want to make your image wrap just like the original background on the Dilecto theme. Take careful measurements of the top and side areas and then create your “wrap” image with those measurements in mind.
That is what I did with the following site.
http://www.roxybikinis.com
(FYI… that isn’t my site, I did that for a friend)
Chuck
@Chuck,
Thanks but that’s not what I want todo with mine. I already have my background, and the header.jpg created. I just want to add an overlay image onto the header area that contains some graphics. I just need to know:
@ Alice -
The MIAN header section is controlled by the style reference for: #bgcontainer
It is the width of the page and goes from the very top edge, to the top edge of the content section.
You could try adding a background attribute to it… but I can tell you that a jpg image will block everything behind it (Fancy little swirly things)
If you want any of the exposure to the header section background, you will need to use a gif with transparency, or a png image. Also, png will not show transparency on anything oler than gen 7 browsers like ie6.
Mark
Thanks Mark. I can change the pic format to gif or whatever it needs to be, that’s no problem. It is transparent except for the objects I put on it that I want to be seen.
I don’t know what it means to “add a background attribute to it.” I just need cookbook instructions on where to upload it.
1. what format should the file be in so that the site name & page tabs show thru?
2. what do I have to do to get it onto the site and working? i.e., what file do I upload it to, does any other code need to be there and if so what?
I’m not a programmer. I don’t have a clue about this stuff. I just want to add these pics to the header, and need simple, basic, non-techy instructions. :-)
@ Alice
Explaining this is enough for 2-3 posts! LOL
Essentially, you need to make sure you image is no bigger than: 130 (Tall) by 1005 (Wide) in order to fit it in the space accordingly.
You should save your image into the theme folder/images/ within the wordpress system, so it is directly related to your custom theme.
Once the image is in the folder ON THE SERVER, you need to tell the stylesheet to use it.
Open your stylesheet and change the values for the bgcontainer:
#bgcontainer {
width: 1005px;
margin: 0 auto;
background-image: url(images/yourimage.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: left;
}
Mark
perfect! that’s all I needed. I don’t know any stylesheet stuff yet, other than editing little things here and there. :)
Hi Mark~ This is a great looking theme. I’ve gotten it to work on the wordpress side with the bans in the sidebar..looks good. But I’m having problems with the bans dilecto headers and footers. Are there any steps that the instructions didn’t cover in regards to that? It tells me it can’t find a file in a certain location, so I move the file and it tells me the next file it can’t find, and round and round I go. I’m missing something obvious ~
Here’s what it’s doing: http://www.buy-mineral-makeup.net
Thanks for all your help~
Kim
If I wanted to add a Google AdSense box to appear right above the first blog entry, how would I do that?? I can do minor edits of stuff already in place, but have no clue how to write the code to make this appear in that spot.
Also, are Google ads in some special kind of widget, or does just adding a text box and some code do the job?
Thanks!
Can anyone help interpret what this error means? I installed this theme on an existing BANS site, which I’m keeping on the root for now. I have no idea what these errors means, or what to do to fix them, so I’m hoping someone can please help
Warning: require_once(/home/greatest/public_html/timewonttell/wp-content/themes/dilectio/pathvars.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/greatest/public_html/timewonttell/themes/BANS_dilectio/header.php on line 5
Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/home/greatest/public_html/timewonttell/wp-content/themes/dilectio/pathvars.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/greatest/public_html/timewonttell/themes/BANS_dilectio/header.php on line 5
@ Kim –
On your site – there is something not configured ptroperly to grab the network address of the domain. Open your pathvars.php file and see if everything is configured properly. Your BANS and BLOG urls, should be Fully Qualified addresses, ie: http://www.mydomain.com
@ Alice –
In your pathvars file, you have not defined the blog location, but left it as http://www.timewonttell.com.
Change the blog location to http://www.timewonttell.com/blog
You MUST include the blog/ directory.
Mark
@Mark,
Thanks. But here’s my pathvars:
It is already named with the /blog in the location. Why isn’t it working??
@Mark,
Thanks. But here’s my pathvars file – it looks to me like it’s already set up correctly with the right name:
Why isn’t it seeing it??
Weird…why aren’t my responses appearing??
They didnt appear because you posted links in them…. I have WP setup to auto-hold comments with links to stop spammers.
This theme was setup for BANS in a folder… so you need to open your BANS theme files: header.php, footer.php and tell the files that you have the blog files in a blog folder.
(I removed the ? marks to allow it to post)
Header – line 5 – You should see:
< php require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/wp-content/themes/dilectio/pathvars.php"); >
As you can see, the DOCUMENT_ROOT is your file location to your root folder. You need to add /blog in front of the final destination.
< php require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/blog/wp-content/themes/dilectio/pathvars.php"); >
This may be in additional files as well.
Mark
Got it! Thanks Mark. :-)
Oops, looks like I left the code intact in my last post so it got caught in the filter… here it is again.
Somewhere, in one of the 6 files I added the /blog to, there is an extra /blog that’s giving me the error below. I’ve gone over every file and just can’t find where the error is. I’m totally out of ideas. Can anyone give me a clue?? Thanks!
@ Alice -
How about in your /BANS_dilectio/header.php file, on line 15?
Mark
@Mark,
Here’s that line, and it looks to me like it should (but I could be wrong!!):
< php $file_ contents = file_ get_contents($blogurl .” /blog/inc-bans-header.php”);
@ Alice -
You have the blog/ directory referenced twice.
$blogurl in the pathvars file, likely has your blog location already coded in. There is no need to add the /blog behind it.
Mark
I removed the /blog from line 15, but now I get this error message.
I looked at inc-bans-header.php on line 1, and this is it:
Now what? I wish I could decipher what its telling me!
Sorry, didn’t disguise it enough:
php require _ once ( ‘pathvars . php ‘ ) ; >
@Mark
Could you please look at my Oct 12 post, and give me some advice? Every error I fix generates new ones, and I’m going crazy with this. I don’t know what this message is telling me to do, and I need to get my store back up and running normally!! Thanks.
@ Alice –
The onsite error states that the path to pathvars is wrong.
/home/xxxxxxxxx/public_html/timewonttell/blog/inc-bans-header.php on line 1
The key part being the line 1, in the /blog/inc-bans-header.php file.
Open that file and see where it is looking for the pathvars.php file. If the path is hard to figure out, just put the FULL address to the file and see if that helps.
The pathvars, if in the correct theme folder, default setting should be:
If you have moved pathvars OUT of the dilectio theme folder in wordpress, you will have to direct line 1 to it.
Mark
@Mark,
My pathvars file is in:
/public_html /timewonttell /blog/ wp-content/ themes/ dilectio/
which is where its supposed to be, isn’t it? And my line 1 on the inc-bans-header file looks just like what you show above.
Are all 5 files (the 3 inc- files, pathvars, and sidebar) supposed to be in this same folder? The instructions say the 3 inc- files should be in the ROOT of the blog file (/public _html / timewonttell / blog) and the other two in the theme folder. Is that not right?
Hope you can help figure this mess out, because now now I’m totally confused about what goes where!
@ Alice -
You just hit the issue on the head – and I looked at the install directions, and hit myself on the head!
ALL the WordPress files are in one folder and there should be none on the domain or blog root. Apparently, when I wrote those directions, I formed the tree for the file locations correctly, but I left some of the text from an older install in place. I am changing NOW!
The inc-bans-header, inc-bans-footer and inc-bans-sidebar ALL go into the wp-content/themes/dilectio/ theme folder, with the rest of the theme.
Sorry about this…
Mark
Oh good, so I’m not the one who’s nuts… ;-)
I moved the files, repointed the BANS header file to find everything in the theme file, and I get no errors. YAY!
HOWEVER… I also get no header! It looks like a boring but regular webpage, but its not pulling the header and other style info from the blog side. NOW WHAT DO I DO???
@ Alice -
Unfortunately, one of the changes I emailed you the other day, now needs to be reversed!
In your BANS/themes/header.php file, recall adding the /blog/ to the references to the directory?
The /blog you added needs to be pulled back out.
I apologize for this – if you want to shoot me the site info, I will gladly jump in and fix this for you once and for all!
Essentially, ANYWHERE it asks for the pathvars, following the Server(document_root) is fine… but there are a few other sections that call the blogurl. from the pathvars. It looks like they have a /blog/ directory behind them as well.
Check the top 10 lines of the BANS header.php file. LEAVE line 1, calling pathvars, the way it is… but remove the extra /blog/ after the ones with $blogurl.
Mark
Mark
You got yourself a deal!! I just emailed you my login info. Have fun! :-)
HELP! Why am I getting an Error 404 when I try to view a published post I just wrote?? It shows up fine when I go to the home page, but when I click on the title to go into the post itself Hostgator sends up the error page. I also can’t View Post from within wp-admin, I get the same error. Why does it show up on the home page but not by iteself??
I’ve been writing posts all day on different blogs, and this is the only one that’s causing a problem.
http:// http://www.ilovehalloweenonline .com/2008 /10/ hawthorne-halloween- villages-spooky-fun/
@ Alice –
Theres something amiss on your htaccess file for the site.
Go into your wp-admin, click on settings > general > scroll to the bottom and just click on save. It should rebuild your htaccess for THAT site.
If that doesnt work, open your cpanel > file manager > browse to your folder for THAT SPECIFIC site, and in the root of your wordpress (Looks like the site root) rename you htaccess to htaccess_old, and save it.
Go back into your wp-admin > settings > general > scroll to the bottom and save… it will auto rebuild.
Mark
Yep, that was it. All fixed now!
Except that I couldn’t do it myself, I kept getting an error saying I wasn’t allowed to do it. I had to ask the Hostgator tech support to do it for me.
I want to delete my ebay store categories from the blog side of a site. The sidebar.php file has the following code that pulls it in:
If I just delete this, will it just make the categories go away, or will it trash my site? Do I need to change/delete anything in any other files or just this one?
Thanks!
Oops, looks like I didn’t disguise the code well enough so its not showing up…
Anyway, its the code in the sidebar.php file for the ebay BANS store. If you know the answer to this question then you know which code I’m talking about. ;-)
@ Alice –
In the sidebar, you can just pull out the code that calls the file, and any surrounding code that is there to display it.
On this theme – you want to remove:
< div class="widget widget_categories" >
< h2 >Our eBay Shop< /h2 >
< ul >
< ? php $ file_contents = file_get_contents($ bansurl." /inc-store-menu.php ");
echo $file_contents; ? >
< /ul >
< /div >
Obviously, I spaced this code to allow it to display.
Mark
Mark,
I give up. I’m converting a BANS site into this template, and can’t get the eBay store to display in the right sidebar of the blog – I get an error message that I can’t figure out.
This site has BANS on the root and WP in the /blog folder, so I went thru and added /blog to all of the usual places in the header & footer files, but I may have screwed that up… It’s finally displaying the template correctly, so I don’t want to undo that, but really need to know how to get the ebay store to show in that sidebar.
Just click on my name to get to the blog site and the error message. Thnks for any help!
Sorry – there was a typo in my email address in the first post…
@ Alice –
It appears you may not have the pathvars.php file set correctly. It is pulling in your blog theme directory, versus the bans site address.
That section of the sidebar code looks for:
$bansurl/inc-store-menu.php
Open your pathvars.php file and make sure your $bansurl declaration is set to your main domain, versus the blog location.
Hi Mark,
My pathvars is set up like this:
$ bansurl = http: //www.saddlesandbridles.com
blogurl needs to be the location of your WordPress blog without a trailing slash
$ blogurl = http : / / www .saddlesandbridles.com/blog
@ Alice –
Open your wp-content/themes/dilectio/sidebar.php file, and tell me what it asks for on line # 89
This is the link causing the error.
Mark
Here it is:
php $ file _contents = file_get_contents ($ bansurl. “/ inc-store-menu.php “)
@ Alice –
I see the file in place… Try editing your sidebar.php file and changing line #89 to:
file_get_contents (‘ http://www.yourdomain.com/ inc-store-menu.php ‘ )
(Note that the quotes are now single quotes on each end of the url, and remove any extra spaces I may have put into this comment)
Mark
Yay! It now works! Thanks Mark.
Why are those quotes ” causing a problem now? I just uploaded the file as it was, and didn’t notice this causing problems before.
Its not the quotes causing it, you just use single quotes with a direct url, versus double quotes for a variable.
This is the same issue that many have experienced in the past… the php.ini file is prohibiting includes from executing.
M
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