Keyvan Nayyeri

I didn't want to make this public before deploying to my site but as Scott has written about some free web templates and listed Mollio so cat is out the bag!

Recently I was working on a new template for my site to apply it here after first public Beta release of Community Server 2007.  You know I'm not a professional designer so I had to choose a good open source template that fits to my site.  Main drawback of all my previous themes was the difference between my blog and other parts of site so this time I came up with the idea to work on a new template for whole site based on my site requirements.

Some months ago (last year?!) Scott had used a very beautiful template on his site for a few weeks.  That template was Mollio, an open source template that is designed in several types but with one single CSS file (some readers may know it).  After checking different type I decided to use Type F because it lets me to put all my content in sidebars and content wrapper easily.  Mollio is a template with great details that make it beautiful.

Using this template needed some changes in default CSS.  I had to add some CSS codes for links, tags, titles and ...  However, I had to spend much time to change CSS and add new styles.

Finally I could do it and new template is almost ready (at least for blog).  Fortunately it wasn't so hard to apply this modified template to site master file and it could give me a good result so I'm very close to finishing this template for whole site as well.

The interesting point that I want to share with you is about Chameleon (new theme engine in Community Server 2007).  Ben has done a great job on writing this new engine and I could import things easily (as Scott has said and I wrote in previous paragraphs, importing the Mollio was a little complicated though).

Here are some snapshots of my new template (coming soon).  On production it will be better with more data.  It needs some tweaking though but I want to wait until last pre-Beta release to apply changes.

At the end, as Scott has asked for more open source templates, I'd like to add Template World as a site with excellent free templates.

Stay tuned, Community Server 2007 is coming!