CollyLogic: Logical Blocks template for EE

Logical Blocks template for EE

10th December 2004

Woo-hoo! My Logical Blocks template has just won 2nd prize in the Expression Engine template contest. As you may know, I’m a big advocate of EE, and my prize of a $100 Amazon voucher, free copy of EE, and free hosting is a very nice Christmas present indeed. Read on…

Logical Blocks was designed to work seamlessly with EE’s unique, flexible tag system, and chunks of the markup can be easily removed without the whole structure falling apart. In essence, it was built to enable users new to CSS to delve in and make sense of things very quickly. It’s been suggested that it will be a template option in future EE builds too.

First the worst, second the best, third the one with the hairy chest. I’d have loved to have won first prize, but well done to Luke Stevens for his very adaptable and clean Trendy Blue design. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to BUY Emma an iPod Mini for Christmas.

Cheers to all the EE users that voted for my design. You have excellent taste.

Simon Collison published this on 10/12/04, at 7:55 PM

Comments

Congratulations. Thats a fine looking design. Love the transparent navigation. You are making me wish I wasn’t using MT for my website now.

11/12 at 13:25 from James

Congratulations. I actually perfer your design over the winning one. It looks a lot more professional than the blue design. The winning design has a definate blogger.com style going on IMO. However, I don’t like the big blocks of dark grey for the main content. Apart from that right on.

This is my first post on here...and with every keypress I get the Google adds flcikering over the form from the name input halfway into the textarea.

11/12 at 15:13 from Trovster

Incedentally, I’m loving the new Christmas mast-head. Nice chick - a friend of yours?!

11/12 at 18:24 from James

James: Alas, the Xmas lady is not a friend of mine. Anyway, you should see here face - eeurgh!

Trovster: Welcome! Thanks for your comments about the template. I can understand why the blue one won - EE users would’ve been looking for a very simple canvas to work with, whereas my design employs more images and CSS (although very easy to customize as it’s all commented throughout).

By the way, what browser is the Google adsense problem occuring on - it’s OK on my Mac browsers? IE PC?

11/12 at 18:33 from Simon Collison

Good work fella, but does seem like the iPod mini should have been yours. I’m taking to the streets, Ukraine-style as we speak.

11/12 at 21:27 from Simon Snorkeller

Simon: Ukraine-style? Nice one, Citizen Snorkeller. Watch out you don’t get poisoned like Victor Yushchenko. Yes, I’m a bit gutted now about the iPod Mini, and apparently the voting was extremelly close. Still, top marks to the winner…

11/12 at 22:53 from Simon Collison

Congratulations! I’m liking those tabs, very nice. Shame about the iPod Mini but like you say free copy of EE, free hosting - not a bad package.

James - Switch from MT is all I can say. I’m in the middle of doing it and EE is like a breath of fresh air (especially when you’ll have templates like this one at your disposal!)

13/12 at 20:19 from Mark Boulton

Mark, it seems like a big step. I’ve been building my site for months now, so to change now seems a bit drastic. I might try the trial copy though. See how I go. Have to admit EE looks very feature packed.

13/12 at 20:28 from James

James - Yeah it is a big step but i’ve been so plagued by spam and the inability of MT to do stuff I thought i’d invest the time and money. I see what you mean though and it did take me about a week to decide. Install the demo and see what you think.

Simon is certainly was instrumental in me making the final decision - his thoughts on the matter and comments on EE were enough for me to take the plunge. I thought if all the support on EE is as helpful as this, then I can’t lose!

13/12 at 20:41 from Mark Boulton

Right. I have decided to have some fun with the trial version starting tomorrow. I’ll let you all know how I get on. Dont understand half the technical stuff it offers, but I’ll do my best.

13/12 at 22:45 from James

Wow! two new converts. This is good news for a great CMS/blog tool. I’ll be posting up some introductory stuff on the site soon about EE, and I’ve got a sack-ful of hacks, tweaks and suggested methods for getting the best out of it. Think I’ll post these up starting in the New Year.

13/12 at 22:49 from Simon Collison

That would be very useful. In the mind time, hope you don’t mind the odd email ... ;-)

13/12 at 23:08 from Mark Boulton

Not at all, Mark. If you need a tag to do a certain task, need to extract something from the database, or need to make sense of conditional tags, statuses or anything just let me know.

The rest of you, look out for the EE articles here in a couple of weeks.

13/12 at 23:53 from Simon Collison

Congratulations,
It was my preferred template, but I’ve made a mistake I’ve clicked on another link. :D
EE is a great CMS/Blog system, but expensive for bloggers, I think. I’m a registered pM 2.3 Pro user , and I’ve switched to WP, the development of pMachine is dead (EE is the new product to promote !), and every posters on the forum (pM section) can read everywhere “EE can do that, ... EE use plugins and you can easily modify it ... you need to upgrade”. Lol Nice CMS, I’m happy that you won a licence for your work. ;)

PS: I don’t like this ugly url index.php? /weblog ... :(

14/12 at 10:39 from Guillaume Thomat (aka Le Cactus)

Congratulations Colly,
I can see why the other design won, but you had my vote ... your design is fantastic, and a lot more feature-rich than the others (IMHO).
Hope to see your template available for download soon!

20/12 at 01:07 from bbm

I must agree that I think your design has more pizzazz than the winning one but at least you got something out of it! Congratulations!

You seem to like that tile effect by the looks of it too ;)

22/12 at 12:48 from Simon Jobling

Yeah, I like the tiles very much! I did indeed get something out of it, but what a shame Amazon aren’t gonna get my gifts to me before Xmas. So much for guaranteed delivery.

22/12 at 14:01 from Simon Collison

I’ve finally purchased the full version of EE. So far so good, although it does take some understanding at first. Its weird that you don’t edit the index page, jusrt web based files, and I don’t understand the paths at all yet, but I think I will. Can’t believe how many features and plugins there are.

Colly are you gonna publish some basic EE tutorials as well as sophisticated ones?

22/12 at 15:47 from James

Yes, I could publish some EE basics. I agree that it’s hard to get into at first, but once you become familiar with it, everything starts to make sense, and you wonder how you ever lived without it. I’ll post up some EE stuff in the New Year.

22/12 at 15:49 from Simon Collison

Looking forward to those Colly!

James - I’ve been using EE now for about a week and it is making sense. There are a few things which, at first, didn’t make any sense but once you get your head round the way it does stuff, like Colly says, it all starts making sense.

22/12 at 16:02 from Mark

Is your EE template in the public domain?

Is it something that everyone can use?

30/12 at 21:35 from Jake Covert

I was wondering the same thing as Jake. I think I’m a bit confused about the EE template contest. i assumed it was to collect a reservoir of templates for EE owners to use, but I can’t find any information on the copyrights of the templates or where one might get their hands on any of the files.

02/01 at 23:59 from Nox

I might be acting outside of the rules here, but I agree that it’s a shame nothing has happened to distribute the templates yet. So, I have emulated the EE templates format for you all:

http://www.collylogic.com/tags.html

From there you can cut and paste the templates with all the main EE tags in place - just watch out for weblog names, category names and all the usual variables.

And PLEASE keep the credits for my design in place in the footer or wherever. AND post here to let me know what you’ve done with the design. AND apologies to the EE boys if I’ve done wrong here.

Have fun…

03/01 at 13:15 from Simon Collison

Cool.

Can you zip / tar up the images and put a link to them on the tags page?

03/01 at 13:22 from Jake Covert

No, not right now. I use a Mac, and EE has issues when zipping template groups on a Mac. Just have to do some cutting and pasting - won’t take two tics will it?

I’ll get a PC person to zip ‘em at a later stage.

03/01 at 13:24 from Simon Collison

Oh, sorry - you said images. Yes, I’ll try and do that soon as I can. Won’t be today though.

03/01 at 13:27 from Simon Collison

Ok.

I appreciate you help.

03/01 at 13:50 from Jake Covert

Jake - and anyone else who needs it - here’s a link to the zip of all the images used in the template. Post here if you have trouble opening it on a PC thingy:

http://www.collylogic.com/contest/contest_images.zip

04/01 at 11:30 from Simon Collison

Everything works great!

You did a great job here.

I hope I’m not being too pushy, or asking too much, but would you be willing to make available the psd for the main title banner?

Jake Covert

04/01 at 13:34 from Jake Covert

Pushy is good - gets things done. However, I don’t have that PSD any more. If you need anything else, let me know.

04/01 at 13:42 from Simon Collison

I’m running a copy of your template on my site, love the design.

04/01 at 21:02 from Kevin

FYI about the Templates: EE 1.2.1 is currently in internal beta testing right now, and once this new version is finished and ready to be released the new Template Library will be revealed as well.

06/01 at 23:22 from Paul Burdick

So is the template you wrote available for use? I found it to be quite excellent. Or was it just for the competition?

Thanks,

khalil

09/01 at 09:37 from khalil

Khalil,

Read the posts above yours and you’ll see where he’s made the template available.

09/01 at 12:52 from Jake Covert

Chaps,

The template is now part of the latest EE install. If you need to look at the source code, visit:
http://templates.pmachine.com/

Thanks to the EE dudes…

16/01 at 22:33 from Simon Collison

Simon,

We’ve spoken via email, but wanted to show others what I have done with Logical Blocks over at my site as it may show some things that can be done with LB ...

All credit goes to Simon, all the blame for anything broken goes to me and me alone :)

Thanks again for such a great place to start!

02/02 at 21:37 from John P. hoke

Anyone else having trouble with, grrr.. IE?

If I have an outsize image in an entry, it breaks the content column by making it wider, thus rendering it below the left-side column.

15/04 at 14:35 from Dan

Just wanted to say thanks for a great template. I’ve got it running on my site EFL Geek with some minor modifications - mostly javascript show/hide stuff.

27/05 at 02:46 from EFL Geek

I was wondering if you would be making a matching theme for the forums module? I’ve added forums to my site and will be attempting to make a matching theme, but I am no CSS guru and the task is rather daunting to me.

If you want to see what I’ve done so far (not much really) you can see my forums here. Hope to hear from you on this one soon.

Thanks again for a great theme.

04/07 at 03:44 from EFL Geek

I’ve basically finished making the logical blocks theme for the forum module. It’s not exactly the same but it will mesh nicely with any site using the LB template set.

You can see the original EE forum thread here and a screenshot here and if anyone is interested the it is available for download here.

07/07 at 04:21 from EFL Geek

Good work, EFL Geek. Nice to see you and so many others taking the template and running with it....

07/07 at 09:12 from Colly

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