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Templates and Themes For Serendipity - S9y

Screenshot: S9y-Bulletproof.com Templates

The number of freely available templates or themes is a critical ingredient for the success of any Blog software.

I have advertised Serendipity Blog software (s9y) and Garvin Hicking’s new book on Serendipity in my previous post. Today, when I answered a comment on my Blog, I actually got into thinking about the importance of templates, and decided to write this post about themes and templates.


  • S9y offers a great deal of flexibility and customization without the need to tweak the template code directly. The configuration and Plugin management via the Admin interface is straight forward and very flexible.

  • The use of the Smarty Templating Engine separates design and application code.

However, one main advantage of Wordpress...
over s9y is the huge base of cool looking themes for almost any purpose. Most or at least many of them are readily available for free. A new blogger just picks any of the themes and is done! There are SEO optimized themes, AdSense optimized themes, etc.

I mean look at the following search terms. I added up the number of search results on the big three (Google, Yahoo, live).
free wordpress themes 34,700,000
free serendipity themes 2,470,000

We know, the bigger a community the faster it grows. Wordpress is ahead of s9y in terms of popularity more than just a short head. Anyway, I am a s9y fan and I'll tell you how to deal about s9y templates (it's not as scary as you might think of).


Let’s talk s9y themes straight

All official templates are available at the official Serendipity Web site. I have counted about 103 official templates or so.

You can either
  • reconfigure those,
  • modify them with Plugins,
  • edit the template files (PHP skills not required),
  • or start from scratch and design your very own template.

A good starting point are the “bulletproof” templates, which were created as template framework for designers. Start with your unique template from here:
S9y-Bulletproof.com

The Bulletproof developers' primary design goal was to create a template which can be base of any of the “classic” Blog layouts, in any popular browser, on any popular platform, without falling apart. Bulletproof makes great use of s9y's “theme options”, so users can now configure almost any desirable option using just the administration panel. There is almost no need to edit any of the template's core files for the most desirable features.

I hope that helps
Yours
John W. Furst

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