#Ortho
Ortho is a theme for WordPress, custom designed by Rob Friesel for his blog, found_drama. Though Rob considers the theme at “1.0″ status, it is not currently intended for public distribution; perhaps a later and more mature version will be opened up for that purpose.
Ortho’s main goal is a quick page-load time; we pursue that by minimizing the number of discrete http requests made to the server, by minimizing the data transferred with each request, and where possible, spreading out those requests across multiple hosts. A few examples of techniques employed here:
- JavaScript and CSS files have been minified or packed;
- Conditional comments have been used to exclude Internet Explorer-specific CSS files all together;
- The jQuery core library is downloaded from Google’s public CDN equivalent;
- The few images used in the CSS as embellishments have been processed with Smush.it.
Ortho is also intended as a variable-width template; it uses the min-width attribute on several page elements as a way of keeping those items from getting squashed but also uses percentage-based margins, padding, and width on other elements so that it scales with wider windows. If you’re using a modern browser that supports web standards and min-width, grab the corner of your window and try it out.
A few indispensible plug-ins that help make Ortho even more special:
Ortho Release History
- Ortho source control migrated to GitHub (3/22/2009)
- 1.0 release (3/15/2009)
- Emergency fixes for search and comments forms, added support for WordPress Ajax calendar (3/11/2009)
- 0.6 release (12/31/2008)
- Fixes for natively-applied WordPress image styles (12/28/2008)
- 0.5 release; updated for WordPress 2.3 support (9/27/2007)
- Added Twitter marquee support (9/12/2007)
- IE-related fixes and tweak (3/25/2007)
- Original “0.25″ release (3/18/2007)
Ortho on GitHub
Interested in Ortho? Want to try it on for size? Care to help make it a stronger theme? Well, I have made the Ortho source code available on GitHub: http://github.com/founddrama/ortho/
