Back in January, I wrote that the blog would get a new makeover a little before or after the Spring–or by late March, to be precise. Now that the end of March is drawing closer, as promised, here’s a preliminary snapshot of the upcoming blog design. Codenamed, “Sherbet News”.

I hope to have it launched by the end of this week. I was originally going to write this post last Friday, but I ran into a few styling and coding problems with the Comment form and Posts/Page templates. The theme is 80% complete!

There will be a few features added along with the new design:

Front Page

1. Scrolling Featured Content (Using the Dynamic Content Gallery Plugin)



2. Magazine-style Recent Posts (No more “scattered” content across categories)
3. Thumbnail Previews



4. Category Tabs (Shows the last 3 entries across different categories in a tab environment, thanks to Yahoo! UI TabView)

Sidebar

1. Improved Subscribe Plug (along with RSS Mascot, Mirai from DC.com)
2. Google Friend Connect Widget
3. Exclusive Posts (Important posts relating to events, interviews, reviews, etc)
4. RSS Feeds of Otaku blogs such as Danny Choo/Otaku.fm
5. The usual widgets: Archive, Blogroll, etc

Post Pages

1. Magazine-style Author Information (Below Post)

Comments

1. WordPress 2.7 Threaded Comments Feature
2. Enhanced Commentator Information (slightly based on the comment template on Danny Choo’s blog)

“Sherbet News” is the very first WordPress theme I have ever made and I intend to stick with it for a very long time. It’s a theme I can adjust at anytime without any major changes, and its unique appearance gives CTM that branding feel! ^_^

Even after the theme is online, there will be extra adjustments to the styling that I didn’t have time to add. Especially with the Threaded Comments, which took the most time working on following the Enhanced Threaded Comments tutorial and having to tweak the functions.php file to get it neat. And finally, there’s the color scheme that I’m not satisfied with, but I’m actively looking into alternatives.

This post will be used for feedback before and after the change, so feel free to jump in for critiquing! ^_^