Yes, another BlogEngine theme.  Yes, I know more stuff than how to theme BlogEngine.  No, this has not turned into a BlogEngine only blog.  Fortunately, I am really into design mode these days, and it shows by the number of BlogEngine themes that I have put out here in the last few weeks.  The latest release is Natural Essence which was originally designed by Arcsin and can be found here.  Even though the inspiration for the theme came from Arcsin, and it looks almost identical, the underlying markup is the same as Envision, which I released last night.  So, the implementation is completely custom, and I am still going with my attempt to use the same markup on as many different designs as possible.  It may not mean much to you, if you are just looking for a quick BlogEngine theme, but it makes the design process more interesting, to me, at least, and it opens up a lot of customization opportunities down the line, but I will give you more details on that in a later post.

I think this will be the last conversion theme I do for a while.  I will probably do a few completely custom themes next, unless I find a design that's really hot that I just feel the need to work on.  And, I am curious if any of you have any suggestions on what kind of designs you might like to see here.  No promises or guarantees, but I am interested in what you may be looking for in a BlogEngine theme.  Feel free to drop me a line in this post, or on the contact page.

So, enjoy the theme, and drop me a line if you come up with any issues.

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Preview

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I have had enough fun for a while with my previous experiments with BlogEngine, and after watching a few of my friends jump on the theming bandwagon lately, I decided it was time to finish up some of my more functional themes that I have been wanting to release.  Envision is the first of a few themes that I plan on releasing for BlogEngine that all use the same markup for the layout, but rely on different styles for the design.  Hopefully, all the future themes that I release in the next few days will all be universally coded, and you could then enable the user to switch them out, just like you can with ThemeEngine.LayoutGala or ThemeEngine.NFL.

Envision was originally designed by styleshout, and was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which is a really permissive license.  More details are here.  And, all the BlogEngine enhancements were released BSD style, so you can do whatever you like.

And, as always, drop me a line or drop a comment if you find any issues with this theme.

Download

Preview

Jesse Foster | jf26028

BlogEngine has been increasing in popularity, and it shows by the number of quality themes that have been released lately.  Adam Zastawski released a conversion of the Marketplace design from styleshout.  It's a very crisp and clean theme, supporting 3 columns and a clean, traditional layout.  It is a great theme, and Adam has made his work available for download for free, so check it out.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Jason Lay has adapted StarGazer from FreeCssTemplates.org, and made it freely available to download and use on your BlogEngine installation.  It's a really sharp theme, and Jason did a great job on it, so head over to his blog and download it now.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

Continuing the RND from my last post, I have created a very simplistic theme based on the Layout Gala example from back in November 2005.  Yeah, that sure was a long time ago.  If you have never seen the Layout Gala, it's worth checking out, even after all this time.

ThemeEngine.LayoutGala is 40 layouts, all using the same markup and styling, but a different structure stylesheet.  So, you get 40 unique layouts, but all 40 are using the same colors, borders, styles, font, design.  All 40 layouts have a header at the top, and a footer at the bottom, but the 3 (sometimes 2) columns are arranged in different orders, and the flow of the layout changes from fixed to fluid. 

Just like ThemeEngine.NFL, it has the concepts of Zen Garden, but its still no where near that level of customization.  This is simply an experiment in stylesheets, design, and BlogEngine, so this example is oversimplified to demonstrate the feasibility of the idea, and to prove that it can be done, easily, in BlogEngine.

Because I built this example on top of the the original ThemeEngine.NFL, the same customizations apply where you can specify a default layout, change the c# to disable visitor selections, and all those things.

Download it here:  ThemeEngine.LayoutGala.1.0

Preview it here:  http://www.gravitycube.net/blog/?theme=ThemeEngine.LayoutGala.1.0

As always, feel free to drop me a line if you have anything to say, or if you find any issues.

Jesse Foster | jf26028