WordPress Theme for CLF 2.0
I was very pleased this week to see the Office of the Privacy Commissioner blog using WordPress. The blog follows the common look and feel (CLF 2.0) set out by the Treasury Board.
It’s great to see WordPress being used on a government site. Kudos to the authors who put it together.
Seeing that it can be done, we put together our own CLF 2.0 WP theme for DFO.
You can download the theme here: http://sensorymetrics.com/wp-CLF-2.0.zip
The CLF 2.0 theme is based on the classic “andreas01″ WordPress template by Andreas Viklund. This theme is xhtml strict 1.0 and closely follows the TBS CLF2 templates (version 1.04).
Known issues with the CLF2 theme that need to be fixed:
- Date format is not picking up the WP settings. This code: <?php the_date(‘Y-m-d’) ?> should work but for some reason it’s showing the wrong default format.
- The metatags are set once across the entire site rather than being different for each page. This can be fixed using a WP plugin for metatags.
- WP widgets can be used in the right hand column. The left hand column currently shows pages only which suits our needs.
- I’ve been using the WP plugin qTranslate to handle both French and English on the same site. This works more or less, however since it’s difficult to setup. You might decide to simply have two separate sites that link to each other.
- The base.css and base-institution.css are not being used but instead all styles are contained in a single file: styles.css
This WP theme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
I like their warning about social networks and privacy: I’m sure that’s quite accurate, watch what you publish.
http://blog.privcom.gc.ca/index.php/2007/09/21/social-networks-be-careful/
Where can I get the WordPress CLF2.0 theme?
Thanks!
A site has been created to gather CLF themes – would you mind if I contact them about this one?
http://commonlookandfeel.ca/clf/
Please feel free to share. The theme I put together isn’t perfect, but it’s a pretty good start. I’d love to see others contributing towards improving it.
There’s also a Drupal CLF 2 theme underway over at:
http://clf.dev.openconcept.ca/
We'd love to compile and make available CLF themes for all open source applications. We're looking at full community participation.
Yes, please share and distribute. Thanks.
We’ve prototyped something like this and looking to make a case for it. the bilingualism is the toughest part. You say qtranslate is difficult to setup, but is it difficult to operationalize?
qtranslate works pretty good actually. You’ll have to tweak your theme a little (such as the banner and footer), but it’s worth checking out.
In our department, the only CLF2 wordpress installs are for internal use and contributors write in either French or English (or both).