Believe it or not, setting up this beautiful, kubrick based theme actually took alot of work. Endless searching on google for hints or tips, followed by checking out the blog for the theme; only to find out that there weren’t any pre-made solutions. So I did the work myself, and now I’ll write them down for you, so your google search won’t fail you. Lets get it started.
Wordpress 2.1.2 + Plainbox
The first problem I ran into with Plainbox was that it didn’t function that great combined with Wordpress 2.1.2. Problems you may run into; the ‘K2 Sidebar Modules’ will not appear, also if it appears you won’t be able to see the options in the option box to the right. Some of your issues may be resolved below.
1. K2 Sidebar Modules won’t appear
The resolvement of this issue is actually pretty simple, although I figured it out with plain luck and experimenting.
When you transfered the theme into your wp-content/themes folder, you transfered the folder containing
- Plainbox
- wallpapers
- icon.jpg
1. Navigate into your wp-content/themes/plainbox folder.
2. Inside that folder you’ll find a folder called plainbox — Rename this folder to plainbox2.
3. Move the plainbox2 folder one dir ‘up’ — Leaving wp-content/themes/plainbox/plainbox2 to just wp-content/themes/plainbox2.
4. Your all done! But remember not to delete the plainbox (yeah, the one without the ‘2′) folder. Just leave it intact.
2. K2 Sidebar Modules; I can’t see any items in my blue box to the right.
Before we start this part of the ‘tutorial’ I gotta warn you; your not really gonna use this list, because the styles for the items on your sidebar have a pre-set style, so yea, there’s really no use in fixxing it, but if you’d like it to work — continue on.
What we’re going to do here is downgrade our Wordpress 2.1.2 to just Wordpress 2.0.9 — Warning! I do not take responsibility for anything that might happen to your blog.
1. Take a backup of your blog ›› transfer the wordpress folder to your local harddrive.
2. Take a backup of your database ›› Use phpMyAdmins Export function, or the plugin for wordpress.
3. Download the WP 2.0.9 version here (zip) or here (tar.gz).
4. Disable all your plugins in your control panel. ›› blog-url/wp-admin/plugins.
5. Transfer your “fresh” version of WP 2.0.9 to your blog dir using ftp. WARNING! do not overwrite the folder wp-content nor wp-config.php.
6. Go to your adminpanel press the Dashboard link, and you’ll get a message saying your out-of-date or smthin’ ›› Press the link and you’ll be presented with a new link, and then again a new link ›› Just press all three and you’ll be ok!
7. Your all done. ›› Browse wp-admin/presentation/ and you’ll see that K2 Sidebar Modules functional. P.S you might have to re-activate the Plainbox theme.
The plugins
Installing the plugins weren’t as painless as I thought it would be, turns out — your in for a spin. Atleast on some of them.
3. I’ve installed the flickrRSS but it looks crappy.
1. Browse your wp-admin/options-general.php hit the flickRSS link on your submenu.
2. Locate the Before/After fieldset and input < li > into Before — input < /li > into After. (Without the spaces ofcourse).
3. Your done! Quick huh? I know … I’m good!
4. The comments tab on the subcontent is all messy/Gravatars won’t display/Gravatars isn’t as big as the ones you’ve got.
1. Make sure you have the ‘Recent comments’ and the ‘Gravatar’ plugin installed and activated.
2. Navigate into the ‘Recent Comments’-settings found on your sub-menu.
3. If ‘Group comments by Posting’ is checked, remove the check-mark.
4. Paste this into ‘Template for the comments’
<li><div class="gs"><img src="%gravatar_url" width="40" height="40" class="kjgrcGravatar/></div><a href="%comment_link" title="%post_title, %post_date">%comment_author</a>:<br /> %comment_excerpt</li>
5. It might be hard to see it in some controlpanel-mods but there’s a linkset inside the blue vertical line found in ‘Recent Comments’ settings. Select; Gravatars from that link set.
6. Inside the gravats settings set the size of the gravatars to 40px and you’ll be ok.
7. Add some comments, or check out old ones to see the result! Good job.
5. I’m having problems with Noteworthy.
I’m having problems with this one myself so I don’t have a fix for now. When I figure it out I’ll update this post.
That’s all
That was all for now, guys and girls. Be sure to check in for future changes in this ‘tutorial’ because when I find problems, I’ll fix them, and post a tut here.
Thanks for following me through these steps. If you have any questions at all please post them in the comments section.
Bye, for now. ![]()
Hello, again
I’ve been a bit busy lately due to a contract I signed on the development of a football fan-club page. Anyhow, I’m here so lets do some fixing!
Preventing ‹‹Sidenotes›› to show up as posts
First off all, to those of you who didn’t get sidenotes to work:
1. Create a new category called “notes”.
2. Edit all the posts you want to set as ‹‹Sidenotes›› and leave them edited with one category more than last time; notes.
3. That’s all.
Now, over to the problem folks might find annoying: Sidenotes showing up as posts
1. Go into your Site Adminpanel
2. Click Presentation
3. Select K2 Options off the sub-menu.
4. Scroll a bit down till you see the ‹‹Asides›› section.
5. Select the option “Sidebar Asides”, this will stall them a bit.
6. Make sure the ‘Notes’ category is selected as your asides category.
7. You’re done!
Straightened it up? No? Give me a comment and I’ll try guiding you through it some other way.
Thanks for reading folks!
Bye for now,
- Chris.




Hey,
Thanks for great tips for Plainbox. It was driving me crazy. I just fixed those two problems: Gravatars and Recent Comments Mess.. thanks to you.
And one last thing: do you have a tip for Blogroll section as well? Mine is not showing anything..
Thanks in advance, I’ll be watching..
Omer
Hi, Omer. Nice that you’re liking the tutorial. I will be posting something on the Blogrol lssue as soon as I can. Thanks for the feedback, and hey, your welcome.
Hey, thanks for the help! I have a question, though. Whenever I use numbered or bullet lists, my font changes to all caps. Also, the bullets don’t show up on IE. I would like to know how to change that. Thank you
Hi, Dair. The problem you are experiencing can be fixed with simple css. Try searching your stylesheets for li and ul. When you find something like #some-div li{ or #some-div #ul{ you’ll find something like text-fransform: uppercase; you can change this to either none; or capitalize;.. For the bullet problem, just search for list-style-type: none; and remove the whole line. Hope this helps. - Chridal
Hi, I’m having trouble with recent comment. How do I display recent comment on the sidebar? I’ve already install Get Recent Comments.
Hi Ayerhitam, the Recent comments aren’t supposed to be shown on the sidebar, it’s just a modification project of mine.
Anyhow, the cuffent effect I have now I got by editing THEME_PATH/addons/recent.php;
In Recent.php just copy the code and paste it, modify it after your desire and you’ve got a winner. I will be posting a more accurate tutorial here when I get the modification working properly.
Great initiative from you. Looking forward for the next edition of your tutorial.
Hi, I just started using PlainBox today actually and the only problem I seem to be having besides the blogroll not showing up is this pesky little error above my first post.
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘’ at line 1]
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT ID) FROM
I can’t make sense of it and the Wordpress forum isn’t exactly being helpful. Any ideas?
Thanks!
So I have only a few problems with my set up. Somehow I cannot get the swedish characters to work at two places (”RSS Subscribe” and “Recent posts”). These are the only places where this occurs, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work.
The other problem I have is how to get posts that are posted under the category “notes” to only show under the tab “Sidenotes”. Do you know how to fix that?
Hello, Ali.
I had this problem myself at first, and I made it disappear somehow
Since it’s a MySQL error I guess this has something to do with one addon/plugin or query not supported by WP itself or a plugin.
What you can try to do is disable all plugins and see if the error still occurs, if it doesn’t try activating the plugins one by one and find out when it occurs.
If it still shows up when your plugins are deactivated I’d say you should either upgrade or “downgrade” your wordpress in order to fix it.
There are tutorials all over the internet of how to downgrade or upgrade your WP vresion, one of those are located a bit up in my tutorial under “2. K2 Sidebar Modules”, you’ll see when it starts.
Hope this solves your problem, if not do a repost. - Chris.
Now, over to you Jamo.
Hi, and thanks for the nice feedback on my tutorial.
1) Swedish Characters don’t work.
This is probably because the files containing the code which executes the appearance of these elemets are saved with a UTF-8 encoding.
This encoding does not support swedish, norwegian, turkish or you-name-it-characters, only the standard ones used in the latin alphabet. What you could you is locate these files and open them with a texteditor and simply choose “Save as” and then change the Encoding from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) or something that looks like that. ISO-8859-1 are the Scandinavian one, I think — it’s at least the one which supports Norwegian special characters.
Location:
RSS: wp-content/themes/plainbox/addon/rss_sub.php
Recent: wp-content/themes/plainbox/addon/recent.php or wp-content/themes/plainbox/addon/recent_comment.php < - It's one of those.. check them both out.
Hope this works out, if not just do another comment and I’ll try to help you some more.
2) Notes showing up everywhere
Well, if you’re meaning that you don’t want the Sidenotes post to show up in “Recent posts” this is going to be a problem. Because the query is something like “SELECT `title` FROM posts LIMIT 5 ORDER desc”, if you don’t know what this means; It means it selects the 5-10 posts posted, so you can’t do anything about this, unless you want to rewrite the SQL queries — if you do know SQL go ahead, but only people knowing that they won’t screw up their blog should attempt this.
BUT! If you mean you don’t want it to show up as a post on the front page this can be fixed by scrolling a bit up and reading the latest part of my tutorial.
Thanks for giving me something to update the tutorial about, all of you.
And hey, I hope this works out for all of you!
Bye for now,
- Chris.
I still have some problems with the “Notes”-thingy. The function works but instead I get a strange mySQL-error message. I’ve tried with disabling plugin by plugin, with no luck.
This is the error message:
SELECT DISTINCT post_date FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_post2cat ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_post2cat.post_id) WHERE 1=1 AND (post_type = ‘post’ AND (post_status = ‘publish’ OR post_status = ‘private’)) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)
Jamo, can you give me any details on where this error occurs? Where does it print out, which section of the blog? Also try viewing the soruce, and see if you can find any filenames related to this Query.
Post me with more info when you can.
The error occurs right above the lastest entry “Erik Enocksson”. It seems that it only occurs when I am logged in the admin panel. Do you know anything about where I can find the code for that?
Hi, back again. I have no idea how I fixed my last problem, but it just went away… seriously.
Anyway, my about page has sub pages and so will my portfolio. When it lists the sub pages it makes the page left-aligned as opposed to center like the pages without sub pages and the blog. Is there a way to list subpages elsewhere? Or at least not make the whole page left-aligned?
I will check back frequently, I look forward to when you add help for the blogroll.
And one more thing (sorry!), I activated the live archives plugin and clicked to set it up under ‘k2 options’ but there’s no archive. Any ideas?
Hi, Jamo
Are you sure the error doesn’t include more? It seems weird that it doesn’t give any syntax error or anything. Please post the full error, doesn’t matter how big it is. Typically it would include the filename and/or line-number in that file where the error occured, thanks for helping me help you
Bye for now,
- Chris.
Hi, Ali
First of all, I browsed your ‘About’ page on your blog, thanks for the nice words on my tutorial, apreciate it alot! Anyhow, lets take care of your problems.
While browsing your page I noticed that it’s only the About page which is getting left-aligned? If this is right, there might be an error in the html or something that you’ve used in the page ‘About’. Make a copy of it, try deleting it and re-writing it and see if the problem persists, do a re-post with the result of it.
Next problem,
Yea, I had this problem myself — actually, hundreds and maybe thousands of people are having this problem. I did some googling and still couldn’t find the proper fix. All I know is, when K2 is installed on a fresh WP installation the Archives page will pop up. Although there probably is another way around it other than deleting your WP installation and installing a new one, I can’t answer to this question, it’s just out of my league — sorry
As opposed to the third problem; Blogroll I can help you with.
Exactly what is your problem on the BlogRoll, just do a repost and explain every aspect of your problem with the BlogRoll feature and I’ll respons as quickly as I can.
Bye for now,
- Chris.
Hey Christian!
Thanks for the work-arounds you’ve posted here. I’ve been trying to mod PlainBox but skills fall way short. I appreciate your tips.
I have a question about the Blogroll — how did you manage to display it in rows? Mine keep showing up in columns — you can see it here. I’ve tried the tips you wrote about but still no go.
It seems that I and Ali have the same problem with the error message, and it occurs only when you are logged in at the admin panel. The error message appears right above the latest post when you are logged in. This is the entire error message:
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)’ at line 1]
SELECT DISTINCT post_date FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_post2cat ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_post2cat.post_id) WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.ID NOT IN (11) AND (post_type = ‘post’ AND (post_status = ‘publish’ OR post_status = ‘private’)) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)
Could you try and log in at your admin panel and then browse to your blog and see if you get the same error?
Hi, Jamo
Then it’s the same message I got in the very beginning of my Plainbox installment or so.
I’m not getting this message anymore, this may also be because I don’t run WP 2.1. I “downgraded” my wordpress version when I got Plainbox because it didn’t fully function with 2.1. Maybe you ought to try this too? Don’t know, but just like Ali, my message disappeared off the earth suddenly too.
Hello. Mark.
Thanks for the great words and all.
Anyway, what you wanna do is browse into your ‘Links’ section. Click ‘Link Categories’ off the sub-menu once in the Links Sec.
Edit your ‘Blogroll’ category and make sure you have < li > in the Before Link Formatting, and < /li > in the after link formatting. (Remember to move the spaces between < and li.
Bye for now,
- Chris.
Hey Christian!
Okay, so about my about page problem, it’s fixed. For now. I followed your advice to no avail. Just to make sure I wasn’t going too too nuts, I named a page ‘The Site’ and entered my about page in it. It showed perfectly. So I renamed it my ‘about’ page and right now it’s showing fine. I still don’t understand what’s wrong with creating pages named ‘about’ but, it’s fixed for now, so I won’t complain!
My blogroll dilemma is hopefully easier, I add links, they don’t show. I’ve tried everything.
As well, I’ve noticed many people including you have the categories displayed in rows, while mine are just a list and I am wondering how to make them show like yours are.
And one last thing, my navigation was in alphabetical order when I started on this whole about page thing, even after I’d deleted re-did about page, how can I make it alphabetical again?
Hi, Ali
Sorry about the advice on the about page didn’t work out. But that’s how you find errors or bugs; by seeking them out. And at least you found a way to make it work for now.
Anyway, my theory on this is that some plugin or part of K2 or Plainbox itself uses the About page for something, and that was the reason that you can’t create a page named ‘About’.
About your 2nd Problem; The alphabetical order.
Go into your Wordpress adminpanel. Go to Manage ›› Pages, select Edit on your ‘The Site’ page, and to your right there’s a lot of options. You should see one section named ‘Page order’ go ahead and expand this section and enter the number of position you want the page to be in. Say if you want it to be after the ‘Blog’ (main-page) type in ‘2′ (without the single-quotes) and so on.
Hope this works out for you.
Now to the Blogroll
What probably is your problem is that you have made some modification to how your Blogroll is displayed earlier, this is just a guessing, though. Anyway, what you want to try is Navigate into your wp adminpanel ›› Links, select ‘Link Categories’ off the sub-menu. Edit the Blogroll entry. In the before Link enter < li >, in the Between enter < br /> and in the after enter < /li >. If this doesn’t work out take a screenshot of that specific page and email it to me on chridal [at] gmail [dot] com, and we’ll try to sort it out some other way.
Hope this helps a bit
Bye for now,
- Chris.
I’ve decided not to dwell anymore on that mwsql-error since no one other than me will see it. The only problem I have left is that with the blogroll not showing. My blogroll is under the category ‘Läsvärt’ and there should be five links, but nothing is showing. Is this also a problem with WP 2.1?
Change the name of the category to ‘Blogroll’ and it’ll work.
I found the problem. The link category was named blogroll, but in the file ‘link.php’ said to get links from category 1, and my link category is #3 so I edited that. =)
Works like a charm now!
I found the problem. The link category was named blogroll, but in the file ‘link.php’ said to get links from category 1, and my link category is #3 so I edited that. =)
Works like a charm now!
Hi, Jamo
Great to know you figured it out ;D Seems like you were a bit more unlucky than me, lucky me had Blogroll as my category 1
Anyway, good job on that, will advice people with similiar problems to try it out
Hahahaha, I know see that you’ve been calling me JaMo all the time which is wrong. ;D
The same thin happen first year in high school when I’d been too uncareful with my handwriting and written the ‘r’ and ‘n’ too close to each other. It took a few weeks to get it correct with all the teachers.
Only a small anecdote for you. =)
/Jarno
I’m glad you have this site up so that I can get some help. What I’ve been wanting to do is to be able to have both the tittle of the link and the image (Favicon) to show up next to each other. For some reason I can only get one or the other to display but not both together. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks. Here is my links page http://jbartimus.com/blog/?page_id=44 I want it to look like the links page on jsbox.net I am using favicache to get the favicons.
Haha! I’m sorry, man. I should’ve seen it from the beginning, but when I typed it wrong the first time it became some sort of a habit! ;D
I am having some success with the theme. Check it out at http://ryan.redemptiovox.com. I would love to share some thoughts. Still trying to get Noteworthy to work. I notice that in the sidebar.php it is commented out but I remove the comment and get errors on the page. I dunno what is wrong with it.
I’m editing PlainBox– heavily. The code is nice– but has some issues with the newest version of Wordpress. So I’m trying to clean it up a bit. That SQL error is in reference to a line of code in the template file–>apps->includes–>info.php
The line of code is
$num_days = $wpdb->query(”SELECT DISTINCT post_date FROM $from_where GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)”);
Change the $from_where to the actual post table– most likely it’s wpposts, wp_posts, or something similar.
The rolling archive gets screwed up by the related post plug in.
-Jason
I too like the Plainbox theme and didn’t want to use a different theme. I found that if I deleted that code
“$num_days = $wpdb->query(”SELECT DISTINCT post_date FROM $from_where GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)”);”
affected writing new posts on IEs only but have had no problems writing them from Opera or Firefox.
I’m not sure how to setup the last.fm into my blog.
It seems that after I installed the flickrRSS and the Scrobbler. . . I can’t access the blogroll and the search graphic dissappeared any ideas?
Okay, I almost all but answered my own question. “Thickbox” screws with the sites ability to load the Blogroll and everything on the bottom correctly.
But, now that ThickBox is uninstalled,
When I click “Looking For Something” I still have a box that shows a dead image link. . I notice on on your site too. Thoughts?
And what can I do to make the blog roll not “rollover to view? Anytime I am clicking things on the bottom of the blog the content disappears and only shows up on mouse roll overs. .
Thanks,.
Nicole,
Download the last.fm plugin for your wordpress, i think i used Scrobbler, and it’ll automatically implement itself into the site once you upload it to your server, activate it via plugins, and implement the correct information.
same goes to Flickr, which uses flickrRSS
Great post.
I remember when I first got this theme, I had to manually edit the code.
I have this error for my header:
ERROR:
/home/vicariou/public_html/onebreath/wp-content/themes/plainbox/images/headers/ is missing.
Please add this directory at your earliest convenience.
Remember to also chmod 777 the headers directory.
I also can’t seem to add the text for my header either. For example where it says /dev and the line underneath.
Hi
Not much on my mind lately. My life’s been completely boring these days. I’ve just been hanging out not getting anything done. So it goes.
G’night
Hi
Perfect work!
Hi,
I already have installed wp 2.3 the lastest version and i get this error in the index
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)’ at line 1]
SELECT DISTINCT post_date FROM GROUP BY year(post_date), month(post_date), dayofmonth(post_date)
in the K2 Options i get this
WordPress database error: [Table ‘_wpgeneral.wp_categories’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT cat_ID, cat_name FROM wp_categories
Why?
Thanks
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article o Plainbox your blog at /dev, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
Hi.
I have installed Plainbox in WP2.3, but i think plugins doesn’t work with Plainbox.
How do you have this sort of comments ( it’s beautiful ) ???
Is it a plugin ??
Thanks
For everyone with the MYSQL error on 2.1 and later versions go into the K2 Options for Plainbox and disable Rolling Archives, this fixed the issue. As apparently its not compatible with the newer releases of WP.
-EMO
Hi, hello, privet
gonadotrophichormone
How I can make the blogroll work? (sorry for the poor english) Someone said to change the categorie ID, but, where I can change this?
Where it’s said to get links????
HERE???
Any ideas how I can use a header image with Plainbox?
@ Dominic - in your wordpress dashboard go to Design then select “Plainbox” as your theme and go to “Theme editor” click on “links.php” in that list, edit per instructions and your set. Hope that helped!
Is anybody else getting this IE script error as well?
Object doesn’t support this property or method
Line: 24
Char:3
Code: 0
which refers to this line:
$(’#topline’).corner(”bottom”);
Any help is appreciated….
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hi,
i’m still workin on plain box. Well, my problem lies in the fact that i’m not able to fix the sidebar. I followed your lead, but nothing… see: www.concepteer.eu/wordpress/ to see for yourseldf. So if you’d be so kind to answer 2 of my questions:
1. do you have the Plain Box V2.2, because thats the one i acually wanted, but the download link on Jsbox is broken
2. can you help me fix my sidebar problem
Thanks a bunch!!
Matthijs
thanks for your help on plainbox..sucks that there’s no forum. I’m unable to find the scrobbler plugin…any ideas on how to change the code so it works with other lst.fm plugins?
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Hi, I’m using PB and i wondered if you knew how to hide the post date on single posts? For example, I have a sticky post that i wish to not display the post date. Can you help me?
Thanks for sharing all this info btw, keep up the good work!
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