And now presenting the losing theme from theme battle #2, again designed by Keith. I know from the theme battles page, it states: The losing theme will be released as well, but only in uncoded PSD form. I actually started coding the Bravissimo PSD into XHTML/CSS though, so I thought I’d release that as well. The coded template has no images, so just a PSD, HTML, and CSS file will be included in the download.
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Today we have an awesome free WordPress theme, originally designed by Styleshout. This theme has a number of cool features and is reminicsent of the FreshPick theme, also designed by Styleshout. There are six widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer, as well as a custom widget included with the theme. It also has threaded comments, so you’ll need at least WordPress 2.7. Other features will also be gone over below.
And now onto the features in more detail…
This theme makes extensive use of thumbnails, so I coded in a custom write panel to insert thumbnails into your posts as an alternative to custom fields.
For both, make sure you use the full path of the image. The images should also be hosted on your domain, otherwise the TimThumb script may not work.
Like I mentioned above, this theme has a whopping six widget ready areas. One in the sidebar, four in the footer, and one on the 404 template.
For the first time, I also created a custom widget for the “Follow Us” links you currently see in the footer. This will require WordPress 2.8 to work, but if you’re currently using 2.7 it shouldn’t break anything.
Simply place the “Feed links” widget in any one of the footer widget areas, and be sure to fill in the respective URLs.
Many thanks to WPengineer for the code to this, which I modified slightly.
This theme has support for the FlickrRSS plugin, which you can currently see in the sidebar. Here’s a screenshot of my settings in case you’d like to set them up on your sidebar like I have them currently:
Hope you all like the theme. It was actually a bit easier to port than it looked, considering I had already done most of the work already with the FreshPick theme. As a lot of the markup was very similar, it was mostly just copying a lot of the functions over to the new theme.
Oh yeah, and for the first time in like 10 themes, there isn’t a theme option page included with the Jungleland theme. Sorry all you theme options lovers, but I couldn’t think of any justifiable reason to include one. If there’s something specific you’d like to change, a tiny code edit might be in order.
A special thanks to Omar Corrales who was kind enough to test out the theme for me and found a couple bugs that I missed. Sometimes it takes an extra set of eyes to find these things.
Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, but if you have any support questions please make sure to post in the forums.
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And now presenting the losing theme from theme battle #2, again designed by Keith. I know from the theme battles page, it states: The losing theme will be released as well, but only in uncoded PSD form. I actually started coding the Bravissimo PSD into XHTML/CSS though, so I thought I’d release that as well. The coded template has no images, so just a PSD, HTML, and CSS file will be included in the download.
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Presenting the winner of theme battle #1, Slick Red. This theme, designed by Anto, features three widgetized areas and four different color schemes. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7+ only and won’t work on earlier versions, and has features such as threaded comments. More info will be gone over below.
And now onto the other features in more detail…
As mentioned above, this theme comes in four different colors: red, green, blue, and brown. Red is the default color, although you can get an idea of what the other colors look like with the logo images below.
So how do you change the colors? Simple, use the built-in theme options panel and select the color of your choice from the dropdown menu.
As mentioned above, the default color is red, so you will have the red color scheme applied after activating the theme.
The other option is to remove the 389×63 widgetized ad area in your header. This might be useful if you don’t have anything to put there, and would rather not have an empty gray box in your header.
Like mentioned above, this theme has three widgetized areas. The sidebar, the header ad, and the 404 page.
This theme has an image-based logo. To edit it you will want to download the PSD file. Then simply reupload the logo.gif file in the images/red/ directory (change to your color of choice).
I hope you all enjoyed participating in the theme battle. Thank you to the 71 voters. Before the vote started, I predicted that Slick Red would win, but didn’t expect it to win by such a wide margin.
If any designers out there want to submit a PSD to compete in a theme battle, please check the theme battles page for more information.
Also, as promised on the theme battles page, the “losing” theme will also be released in PSD format. Check for the Green Shade PSD release post soon.
Let me know what you think of the Slick Red theme in the comments. As usual, please post any support requests in the forums.
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Today we have a grungy theme (hence the name) designed by DemusDesign, which I then ported to WordPress. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7+ only, which means it has support for threaded comments and comment pagination. It also means it won’t work on previous versions of WordPress. It has 6 widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer. More on that, and a couple other things below.
And now onto the widgets, and other stuff…
Like I mentioned above, this theme has six widgetized areas. Four of these are located in the sidebar, and two in the footer. The following diagram will illustrate where exactly these go.
The Top Sidebar, Middle Left Sidebar, Middle Right Sidebar, and Bottom Sidebar should be self-explanatory. The “Footer Lists” widget is designed to house at most four different lists. These can be recent posts, comments, whatever. The “Footer About” widget is designed for text, which you can use to write an about blurb about yourself.
I opted for this instead of a theme options page since with widgets you have a bit more control, unlike in previous Demus Design ported themes like Underwater and Bolshevik which have theme option pages.
On the theme demo you might notice each link on the top page navigation has a subtitle. This was present in the original template and wanted to integrate it into the WordPress version as well. Thanks to this article from ThemeShaper, I was able to do that.
To add the page subtitles, I also coded in a custom write panel that only appears when you’re on the Edit Page screen.
Don’t make it too long or the page list might get pushed to the next line. Unfortunately with the subnavigation code, I’m not sure an easy way to exclude pages besides using subpages, since the page list only displays top level pages.
Thanks again for the nice birthday wishes last week, it’s greatly appreciated.
Hope you all like the theme. Thanks again to DemusDesign for the great template. Let me know what you think in the comments, but remember to post support requests in the forums.
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Today we have a pretty cool looking blog template designed by Rambling Soul. I then took the template and ported it to WordPress (with a bit of help). This theme features an unusual vertical page navigation, visible on the left side, as well as a featured post area. There are also two widgetized areas. This theme is built for WordPress 2.7 and above, and has features such as threaded comments and pagination.
And now onto the rest of the features in more detail…
Similar to FreshPick, the latest stickied post will be displayed as your “Featured” post. This is visible on the main index template only. To set a featured image, simply fill out the URL of a 235×125 image in the custom write panel when you’re publishing the post.
If you don’t specify a featured image, this will be displayed as your featured image instead.
There’s nothing you really have to do to configure this. It will display all of the top level pages in tabs on the left side of the theme. So just publish a top level page, and that’s it.
The reason I held of porting this for so long is I couldn’t really figure out how to output the page list with spaces in between each letter of the page name using standard WordPress functions. Eric Sizemore, a PHP/WordPress programmer, figured out another way and sent me the code to use.
Similar to Sophistigrunge theme, since the page links are pulled directly from the database there isn’t an easy way to exclude pages from the menu. The only way I can think of is to set a page you don’t want displayed as a subpage to another page. This way it won’t be displayed on the left, effectively excluding it from the page menu.
There are two widgetized areas in this theme. The first titled “Left Sidebar” is displayed on all pages below the title area. The other one titled “Home Sidebar” is only visible on the main index template, and can be seen on the right side below the featured post.
Hope you all like the theme! This one was on my “to do list” for a while, as the template was originally released at Rambling Soul over a year ago. Thanks again to Eric and Roshan for their help with the PHP and CSS (respectively) in regards to the vertical navigation.
Let me know what you think in the comments. If you need support though, please sign up and post in the forums.
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Today we have a pretty cool blog/CMS theme originally designed by Rambling Soul, which I then ported to WordPress. At first glance this may look like a relatively ordinary blog theme, but it has a few interesting features which will be gone over below. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7 and above and has features such as threaded comments, but won’t work in previous versions. There are also four widgetized areas.
And now onto the features…
This theme comes equipped with a home page template, which works great when you don’t have a blog on your front page. It is currently visible on the “About” page on the demo site although you would probably want to set it to your homepage and have another page for blog posts.
To configure what’s displayed in the three columns, open up the “WP RS11 Options” link in your WordPress admin panel under Appearance. Then scroll down to the Home Template section and input the data for each column.
The different options for each column should be pretty self-explanatory.
There are also two widgetized areas above and below the three columns on the home page template. This way you can insert widgets with more control on this page.
As mentioned above, this theme comes equipped with four widgetized areas. There are the two mentioned above exclusive to the home page template, as well as one each on the sidebar and the 404 template.
This theme is great if you have a decent number of pages. There are three different page navigation menus in this theme.
So how do you control which pages are displayed in these menus? Go to the “WP RS11 Options” page under appearance and input the page IDs you want included in each menu.
You can also exclude the home link on both the Top Menu and Footer Menu by checking off the respective checkbox.
Hope you all like the theme. Thanks again to Roshan of Rambling Soul for the design. I know I’ve been doing these Rambling Soul templates in reverse order, like the Bamboo theme, but since it’s never too late to port these, and I figured some people would find them useful
Let me know what you think in the comments. Love it, hate it, I welcome all feedback! All support inquiries should go in the forums though. Thanks for reading.
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