MNML, A TumbleLog Style WordPress Theme

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Ian Stewart

Automattic, the folks behind WordPress.com have a great quote on their company site, “Blogging is too hard.” I totally agree.

Why did you start your personal blog anyway? You wanted a place online to share things you found interesting and occasionally write a longer article, maybe even a rant. Right? Did you want to start a magazine site with 40 categories carefully arranged on a complicated home page? Or did you want a blindingly shiny site that looked like it had been attacked by a pack of floor buffers? Probably not. Did you want something simple and cool looking? Something easy to post to? Something that looked and worked like the tumblelog-style WordPress theme MNML? (What’s a tumblelog?)

Maybe. Let’s take a closer look at it.

View the live Demo or Download MNML.

Content First—Literally!

The first thing you’ll notice about MNML is the header—it’s now the footer! I think this is a great layout for a smaller blog where you don’t necessarily want to highlight reams of old content. If you’re more concerned with the immediate, highlighting what’s important to you right now, then the MNML WordPress theme might just be for you. But don’t forget, there are still search and archive pages! Your content isn’t lost.

Quick Posting At The Speed of Thought

When the Prologue theme first dropped, I zeroed-in on the in-theme posting ability it showed off. Right away I thought, “I want that!” Well, now you can have it too.

When you’re logged in, the quick-post form will appear at the top of your index page. Neat, huh?

Now, with MNML it’s crucial that you have a category called “Asides”. This category + the quick-post form + and the MNML stylesheet are going to give you some nice minimalist-looking aside posts. This is what makes MNML a tumblelog. Think Kottke.org and you’ll get what I was going for.

Fans of the Prologue theme will notice I’ve added a series of links to the form, a link to the fuller “Write Post page” in the backend as well as links to sign out and visit your profile, exactly like what’s found at the top of the Dashboard. I may not build a quick-post form into every theme but I’m definitely going to consider building those handy links in.

Find out how to add quick-posting to your own WordPress themes.

Progressive Enhancement

Progressive Enhancement might not be the right word. Regressive Punishment? Okay, wait, maybe it’s not that bad! What I’ve done with MNML is send a separate stylesheet directly to your IE6 visitors (click on the image for a closer look). It’s actually not that bad looking. And at the very least, it certainly fits into the MNML style.

Notice the link in the top right of the header? “Still using Internet Explorer 6?” This is not an affiliate link. All it does is refer your IE6 readers to the download page for Internet Explorer. IE7′s not that bad and I figure it’s easier to convince someone to upgrade the same product rather than switch to a completely new one.

Don’t like the link? Remove it. It’s fine by me.

And speaking of Progressive Enhancement, your Safari readers get a nice little text shadow on the Blog title. You’re welcome.

Get Found and Be Heard

MNML is based on The Sandbox making it safe and search-engine optimized for WordPress. On top of that, I’ve made a few more tweaks, recommended by Chris Pearson, that will help you get heard and help you get noticed.

MNML Isn’t So Minimal, Is It?

I guess MNML isn’t so minimal after all! On top of all that, MNML is GPL licensed. That means it’s free and free forever. Do with it as you please.

One more thing about the styling: while MNML is a Tumblelog style theme it isn’t a tumblelog theme exactly. It does have an aside category but it doesn’t have any other special category styling. This is intentional. I want posting to be easy. I don’t want you to have to use and remember special formatting for each post. MNML, and tumblelogs in general, are supposed to make blogging more fun. Not more of a pain.

Have at it!

View the live Demo or Download MNML.

128 thoughts on “MNML, A TumbleLog Style WordPress Theme”

Allan Cole on February 21, 2008 at 11:26 am said:

This is an Awesome Ian! I will definitely be using this for my personal blog. It’s straight to the point — no games, no gimmicks. I was a little skeptical about having the header replace the footer, but with MNML it definitely seems logical. Plus, traditionally, there always seems to be similar types of content in both of these areas; makes sense to consolidate. Prologue is also a great feature. I was just reading your article about adding it to my own blog, but this one looks so nice that I will be sparing myself the time. Thanks and Great work!
Ian Stewart on February 21, 2008 at 11:44 am said:

Hey, thanks, Allan! You’re welcome. By the way, I love allancole.com. Great look.
Allan Cole on February 21, 2008 at 12:43 pm said:

Thanks alot Ian! I will probably be using MNML on my personal blog here. I may tweak colors a bit. I’ll let you know when its up and running/on and popping!
David Yeiser on February 21, 2008 at 4:09 pm said:

Very cool, Ian! I love the idea of that quick post option at the top, nice thinking!
Ian Stewart on February 21, 2008 at 4:23 pm said:

Thanks, David. Are you thinking about adding Prologue-style posting to WP Contact Manager?
Ptah Dunbar on February 22, 2008 at 8:00 am said:

Congratulations on the release! It looks wonderful.

You’ve seemlessly added the prologue functionality to this theme that really makes it stand out!
Ian Stewart on February 22, 2008 at 8:26 am said:

Thanks, Ptah. I think I’m going to have to spend a day or so digging into the WordPress codex though, and seeing what I can do about adding on to Prologue. Support Forums, here I come!
David Yeiser on February 22, 2008 at 8:46 am said:

Yeah, probably something really similar.
Allan Cole on February 27, 2008 at 9:00 am said:

Thanks Ian!
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Chris on March 5, 2008 at 6:31 pm said:

There is a little issue with the formatting of asides. If a post is on the front page and displayed as an aside (and has more than one line of text), the text of the first line comes out wonky. This wouldn’t be a problem, but it makes it hard to click on a link that is on the first line of an aside post. See my homepage for an example, as the demo page doesn’t have a aside with a link on the first line.

Is there anyway to fix this behavior?
Ian Stewart on March 5, 2008 at 9:16 pm said:

Thanks for letting me know about this, Chris. I’ve updated the file and a corrected ZIP is ready for download. If you’ve already made some modifications to the theme and you just want to add the fix, open up style.css and find .entry-content on line 193. Add the following:

position:relative;

That should fix it.
Chris on March 5, 2008 at 10:37 pm said:

Thanks for that quick fix, Ian. I really appreciate a theme designer fixing issues promptly, as many release themes and then refuse to provide any semblance of support.
Chris on March 6, 2008 at 9:58 am said:

Ian, another fyi. The MNML theme displays weird in Firefox 3 right now. Items from the index are shown on top of the bottom header. Not something that is an issue right now, but just wanted to let you know.
Chris on March 6, 2008 at 10:00 am said:

To clarify, it is actually only post text that is displayed on top of the bottom header. The text in the sidebar and post titles do not cause an issue.
Ian Stewart on March 6, 2008 at 11:21 am said:

Weird. I wouldn’t have expected a problem in Firefox 3. The soonest I can look at that would be tomorrow, Chris. Thanks again for the heads up.
Ian Stewart on March 6, 2008 at 7:22 pm said:

Got to it early. MNML updated and ready for downloading. A little position:relative here a little z-index there and everything should be fine.

I hope.

And wow. If I didn’t depend on four or five awesome extensions I’d be using Firefox 3 right now. It’s perfect.
ziemek on March 18, 2008 at 10:38 am said:

I like this theme very much.

noticed that Alignments other then align=left are not working for me in the post.
I would like some elements of my post to be centered.
Is there anything that could be changed or that i could change to make it work?

thanks in advance
Ian Stewart on March 18, 2008 at 10:48 am said:

The image alignment is class based. You’ll need to use alignleft, alignright, center. I’ll be updating this for WP2.5 to also use align-left and align-right, the new defaults.
Mack on March 18, 2008 at 11:25 am said:

Now that the release candidate for WP 2.5 has been released, when will we see the update to this theme?
Ian Stewart on March 18, 2008 at 12:12 pm said:

I’ll post an announcement.
Chris on March 19, 2008 at 4:15 pm said:

Ian, the issue with the link on the first line of an aside is happening still (with your current MNML download). I am only noticing this, though, if there is an aside that is the first post.
Kevin on March 20, 2008 at 1:57 am said:

I created an “Asides” category, but whenever I write a quick post, it’s labeled under “Uncatagorized” and displayed as a standard post. What am I doing wrong?
Ian Stewart on March 20, 2008 at 5:10 am said:

You’ll have to make that category your default, Kevin.
Ian Stewart on March 20, 2008 at 5:43 am said:

Chris, do you want to try downloading again? I’ve upgraded the theme to MNML 1.1. Let’s see if it’s still acting weird.
Chris on March 20, 2008 at 11:38 am said:

Ian, I was working off a version I downloaded yesterday. I’m not sure when you changed the download. It would be helpful if you changed the version number in the style.css file to note the changed version (I know its easy to forget that, I’ve done it before).
Ian Stewart on March 20, 2008 at 11:42 am said:

The new theme is version 1.1. Shows up in the theme page in the admin.
Mark McClusky on March 20, 2008 at 3:40 pm said:

Anyone else having weird rollover issues in the sidebar — when I roll over any of the links in blogroll or categories, all of them highlight.

Any ideas on why? It’s Firefox 2.0.0.12
Ian Stewart on March 20, 2008 at 6:30 pm said:

That’s a feature.
Mark McClusky on March 20, 2008 at 6:35 pm said:

Huh…OK.

Feels like non-standard web-ish behavior to me, so I’ll poke around in the code to sort it out.

Nice theme, by the way. Thanks.
Chris on March 22, 2008 at 5:45 pm said:

One more request… a different color or something for the administrators comments on posts/pages. That would be ideal, and I just noticed this theme doesn’t have that.
Darran on March 23, 2008 at 5:47 pm said:

I am waiting for the version for 2.5 before I actually use this, excited about it.
Chris on March 23, 2008 at 9:46 pm said:

Ian, I made sure I am using the version 1.1 of MNML, still having the issue with the links in the first line of asides. The links seem to have a very small clickable area. Thanks for your assistance.
Ian Stewart on March 24, 2008 at 1:07 pm said:

Feel like testing some code, Chris? Try adding position:relative to the asides in the stylesheet. Like so:

.home .category-asides * { display:inline; position:relative; }

Let me know if that works.

I swear though, the next theme I release is going to shy away from bonkers CSS!

(Maybe.)
Ian Stewart on March 24, 2008 at 1:09 pm said:

Darran, the current version (1.1) is the 2.5-ready version. I’ll make a post announcement once this bug (the one Chris found) is fixed.
Chris on March 24, 2008 at 5:47 pm said:

Ian, that code appears to work. Also, I fixed the issue with the lack of author comment highlighting. People can add something like this to their style.css file:

.bypostauthor { background-color: red !important; }

You can change the color to whatever work for you.
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Ian Stewart on March 24, 2008 at 7:22 pm said:

Finally! Thanks, Chris.

Re. author comment highlighting: I couldn’t think of a decent solution for MNML that fit. Otherwise, I would have included it.
Chris on March 24, 2008 at 7:25 pm said:

I agree. There isn’t a good color to allow for it. It might work with author comments being on a white background, but then you would have to change the white text in the author comment meta/details to some other color.
Darran on March 25, 2008 at 5:10 pm said:

Thank you Chris! I would be tweaking some colors here and there to suit my preferences.
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guru on April 7, 2008 at 11:39 am said:

love the theme…. i am well involved in this theme on my site so i don’t know if it would be good for me to update.

but one question, how can i remove the quick post box from above the pages once logged in to my admin?

thanks for any help
Ian Stewart on April 7, 2008 at 12:22 pm said:

Guru, you can try reverse-engineering MNML from the tutorial in How To Add Prologue-Theme Posting To Your WordPress Theme—in 2 minutes.
guru on April 7, 2008 at 2:17 pm said:

Ian, that advice worked GREAT!!! thanks
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mccormicky on April 19, 2008 at 6:48 am said:

You so crazy! I love the ideas and I need them stuck as I am in more conventional ways of thinking about theme structure. Header in the footer? Yes, why the hell not?
By the way, clicking on the demo leades to an error message about wordpress-automatic-upgrade/wpau_helper.class.php
Ian Stewart on April 19, 2008 at 10:44 am said:

Thanks, mccormicky. Got that all fixed up.
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guru on May 21, 2008 at 11:55 pm said:

i am using this theme for a release in mid-june.. one more question… is there a way to get only the i hover over the change color and not the entire sidebar? i have been try thing but i think i am stuck…

take care and thanks with any help.

ukre8.thevsproject.com
Ian Stewart on May 22, 2008 at 5:11 am said:

@guru: Do you mean the <i> element?
guru on May 22, 2008 at 9:32 am said:

think so… but you notice as you bring the mouse in the sidebar the entire side changes color instead of just the link you rollover…. is that the element?

i am still relatively new to adjusting code..

thanks
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Rhett Soveran on June 13, 2008 at 6:51 pm said:

Hey Ian,

I am really diggin’ your themes. Quick question: because this is built with Sandbox, I can style the categories, correct?
Ian Stewart on June 13, 2008 at 7:50 pm said:

Yep.
Rhett Soveran on June 13, 2008 at 8:05 pm said:

Sorry, I should have just looked. Duh. Anyway, I am going to be doing some small tweaks, but I will let you know what I come up with. This is exactly the theme I was looking for. It took a long time to find, but it was worth it.
Ian Stewart on June 13, 2008 at 8:53 pm said:

Thanks. Let me know when you’re all done. I really enjoy seeing what people end up creating. Cheers.
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dj on June 20, 2008 at 4:42 pm said:

Wow – of the bajillion WP themes I’ve seen, this is the first one that feels truly thought out design wise about content :^) I love it! Great job.

Is there any way to get the date to show on posts?
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Kevin on July 25, 2008 at 2:05 pm said:

Ian.

I very much like this theme and I am currently setting up a new blog (not public yet) and I an using this theme as of now. I am running into two issues.

1) the quick post box: when I try and use it and then click the “post it” button I get redirected to my blog login page. I do not get logged out but just redirected and the post does not created, any ideas? I can post to the Asides category no problem through the standard post screen but not through your quick post

2) I want to limit what pages are displayed in the header …errr… I mean footer but I cant seem to fins the code for it. I cant find the standard code (or Im overlooking it) that wordpress uses so that I may add the extra little bit of PHP to exclude certain page id’s, any idea?

Any help with these would be very much appreciated.

Cheers

Kevin
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RAGSdale on July 27, 2008 at 11:50 am said:

I really like this theme and have just applied it to my own blog. I am very new to the wordpress theme’s and was wondering how difficult it would be to add in a blog roll to the sidebar? I have very little experience in development so I figured I should ask the guy who made it =)

Thanks, and again, great work!
Ian Stewart on July 27, 2008 at 12:10 pm said:

@Kevin: I’m not sure what’s up with question 1, but as far as question 2 goes, check out sandbox-functions.php.
Ian Stewart on July 27, 2008 at 12:11 pm said:

@RAGSdale: WordPress widgets. Check them out in the design section of the admin area.
Kevin on July 27, 2008 at 12:29 pm said:

Thanks for the help Ian. I found in the sandbox-functions.php file the place to limit the pages links that area shown, thanks for the direction.

As for my other issue about the quick post box its not really an issue in the end, just was curious.

Thanks again
RAGSdale on July 27, 2008 at 3:58 pm said:

Thanks bud! I really appreciate it – the design looks great, just want in wanted =)
Martin McCallion on July 31, 2008 at 5:01 am said:

Hi Iain, I’m getting exactly the same problem as Kevin’s question 1, above, and it’s only since I upgraded to WordPress 2.6.

Type into the Quick-Post box, hit “Post it”, and I get routed to my login page. I log in, and I go back to my main page, but my quick post has gone.

Good theme, though, so I’m looking forward to a fix.
Ian Stewart on July 31, 2008 at 6:03 am said:

I haven’t had a chance to look at this yet. Working on it. I’ll write a post when it’s updated though. Watch for that.
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Kevin on August 17, 2008 at 9:46 am said:

Ian:

Any ideas why all of the pages that I have published (and not private) arent showing in my header? As of now I havent altered sandbox-functions.php to exclude any specific pages, so I would assume that all pages should show, but they arent? Any ideas?

Ive done a clean install of the theme as I thought I might have altered something by accident, but thats not helping?

Thanks for any ideas you might have

Cheers

Kevin
kvl.name/blog
Ian Stewart on August 17, 2008 at 9:58 am said:

@Kevin: Are they Child Pages? Child Pages won’t show up in the menu of this theme (without hacking the CSS).
Kevin on August 17, 2008 at 10:04 am said:

Ian.

Thanks for the quick response.

They aren’t child pages, so that wasn’t the issue, but I found the issue. The plugin PageMesh (http://joelstarnes.co.uk/pagemash.php) was conflicting with the way the pages display, I deactivated the plugin and the pages now display properly.

Thanks again for all the help.
Craig on August 28, 2008 at 6:30 pm said:

Well perhaps the best photo blog child theme…. Meaning MNML
dian on September 6, 2008 at 1:11 am said:

Hi Ian, just want to say thx for the mnml themes
i’m using it for my indonesian site
btw the sidebar change all the color if i hover one of the item
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guru on September 15, 2008 at 3:11 pm said:

hello Ian, great theme and i use a modified version for my site, but still have one thing i cant figure out.

all the links on the right side in the side bar ALL change color (highlight when rolled over) but i just want a sinlge link to change color upon roll over.

is that possible and if so how??? in the css i can only change the color, but not limit it to a single link.

thanks for any help
de on September 15, 2008 at 9:27 pm said:

hi Ian, I really like the navigation in the footer and the fact that it stays even as you scroll through the blog. Do you think that this theme would be a good parent theme? I’m going back and forth between this and thematic.
Ian Stewart on September 15, 2008 at 10:34 pm said:

I keep meaning to make this a Thematic Child theme. You might want to wait for that.
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jeela on September 24, 2008 at 6:39 pm said:

Love the theme, just installed it, but having the same problem as Kevin and Martin McCallion with regard to the Quick Post field taking me to the blog login page and then post just disappearing.

Would love to play with this feature…. any thoughts on a fix? many thanks!
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Joomla Bear on October 24, 2008 at 7:18 pm said:

Love this theme – I’m getting it setup on my blog http://blog.joomlabear.com.
Only one thing – can’t work out how to get the bottom menu to display… I’m a bit noobish with wordpress – will head over to the forum and see if I can solve this – I must be missing something obvious…
Chris on November 3, 2008 at 12:38 pm said:

Ian, any idea when you will be releasing this as a child theme? I’m looking at adding the WordPress 2.7 comment enhancements to my site, but I don’t want to make changes if you are about to release anything big. Thanks!
Ian Stewart on November 3, 2008 at 1:07 pm said:

It’s on the list … but I’m working on adding 2.7 comment enhancements to Thematic in a way that doesn’t break what’s come before. Have you tried making a MNML Child Theme for Thematic? You might find it easier than you imagine (Yes, I’m trying to pawn off work).
Chris on November 4, 2008 at 10:15 am said:

I haven’t tried making this into a Thematic child theme yet, but I will do that this week.

Also, just an issue with your theme here, the font in your comments section looks really strange in Google Chrome. I’m having to highlight text to be able to read it.
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Anne on December 2, 2008 at 8:29 am said:

Hello Ian
Thanks for your theme which is really easy to enhance.
I’ve got an issue though: I have installed the NextGen gallery plugin as this wordpress blog is used as a photographer portfolio.
Galleries are showed in pages and enlarged posts but I can’t have the thumbs in any post summary.
Ex : http://www.fridayfactory.co.uk/photos/?cat=10
I tried with proper text and it worked. Seems like nextgen gallery and your theme are not happy together !
Any clues of what to do ?
Thanks
Anne.
Big Bear on December 19, 2008 at 10:33 pm said:

Loving your theme. Using it over at http://blog.joomlabear.com

However I am experiencing a slight issue with HeadSpace and MNML – My titles are not being picked up, If I switch themes they are.

Also WordPress asks me if i’d like to update to a new version of MNML automatically – however when I accept the invitation I get :

Incompatible archive: PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature

Cheers for a great theme.
Josh on December 21, 2008 at 1:53 pm said:

Any timeframe on when we might see gravatar and threaded comment support in MNML? Or are any new additions unplanned and off the table? I would really like to see updates to this good looking theme.
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brandon on February 9, 2009 at 2:13 am said:

I absolutely love your theme and I am doing a few tweaks to make it work for my blog (thats going through a bit of a revamp). However, I am having the same issue as a few people above with the quickpost not working. I can write in it and tag it as ‘asides’ (yes I made a category for it), and clicking post it simply brings me to a log in screen and then the post is gone.

Could this possible be a wordpress 2.7 issue? It seems to be happening to people having the more recent versions of wordpress.

ThemeShaper

Home of the Automattic Theme Team

MNML, A TumbleLog Style WordPress Theme

Content First—Literally!

Quick Posting At The Speed of Thought

Progressive Enhancement

Get Found and Be Heard

MNML Isn’t So Minimal, Is It?

Like this:

128 thoughts on “MNML, A TumbleLog Style WordPress Theme”

Content First—Literally!

Quick Posting At The Speed of Thought

Progressive Enhancement

Get Found and Be Heard

MNML Isn’t So Minimal, Is It?

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128 thoughts on “MNML, A TumbleLog Style WordPress Theme”