Today we have an awesome news theme, originally designed by DemusDesign, which I then ported to WordPress. This theme requires at least WordPress 2.8 to function properly, and includes some standard features such as threaded comments and comment pagination. There are also over 10 widget-ready areas, including a widgetized footer, plus a custom widget for ad management.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features in more detail…

Post Images

Featured images and thumbnails for posts are used in a number of places in this theme, including the main index page, single post page, archives, and search results. Thanks once again to TimThumb, you only need to upload one image to use in all of these places.

Once you’ve uploaded a 610×281 image, copy the full path to the image and paste it in the custom write panel. This image will automatically be resized and used in the multiple areas mentioned above.

Widgets

There are over ten different widget areas included in this theme. They are color coded in the screenshot below, click it to enlarge the image.

The following are descriptions of the widget-ready areas pictured above.

Sidebar

Tabber – That’s right, there’s a widget-ready tabber. It’s ideal for text widgets, tag clouds, and lists. There probably isn’t room for more than four or five tabs.

Sidebar Ads – This area, as you might expect, is designed for 125×125 advertisements. I’ve also included a very basic 125×125 ad widget which you can use to place the ads in your sidebar.

This widget is not limited to the “Sidebar Ads” widget, but it’s probably the best place to put it.

Sidebar Left and Sidebar Right – These are displayed directly below the “Sidebar Ads” area. It’s ideal for lists of categories, archives, etc.

Sidebar Bottom – This area is displayed directly below “Sidebar Left” and “Sidebar Right” and there’s nothing there displayed by default. It might be ideal for text widgets or a list of recent posts.

Home Left and Home Right – These areas are displayed on the homepage. By default there is nothing displayed. It’s best used with text widgets.

Footer – There are five different widget areas in the footer, with “Footer One” being the one on the far left and “Footer Five” on the far right.

Single Middle (not pictured) – This is displayed only on the single post pages, directly below the “Share This” box with the links to share the post on Twitter, etc.

Conclusion

Those who follow me on Twitter know I’ve been tweeting about this upcoming theme for a while now, so thanks for your patience while I got everything ready. I think themes like this prove that free WordPress themes are still alive, and hopefully you’ll agree with me.

I’ve tried to test the theme pretty thoroughly, but if you notice any bugs with the theme please let me know in the comments or in the support forums and I’ll see what I can do.

Here’s the winner of theme battle #2. The Photabulous theme was designed by Keith as a gallery/photoblog theme of sorts, which I then coded to WordPress. This theme has four widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer, an alternate color scheme, along with a bunch of other features which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the rest of the features…

Thumbnails

Obviously a gallery theme like this makes use of thumbnail images. In order to cut down on the amount of thumbnails you would need to upload, I integrated the timthumb script into the theme. For single posts, you’ll need to upload one 467×350 image and place the absolute path to the image in the custom write panel.

Once that is done, timthumb will take that image and resize it for use on archive pages. If there’s no image specified, a placeholder image will be used on archive pages. No image will be displayed at all on the single post template.

Widgetized Areas

As mentioned above, this theme has four widgetized areas. Three of these are located in the footer: Footer One, Footer Two, and Footer Three. There is one widgetized area for each of the three columns. The fourth widgetized area is located on the 404 template, so you can edit what you’d like displayed on your 404 pages through the widgets panel.

Cufon Headings

The Titillium font is used for the blog title headings, page headings, as well as comment headings. Cufon, a fast text-replacement technique, is used to render this font on the theme.

Color Schemes

Included in the Photabulous WordPress theme is an alternate light color scheme. You might have caught a glimpse of it if you follow me on Twitter, where I tweeted the preview link a few times. Here’s a screenshot of it below.

Switching between the dark and light color schemes couldn’t be simpler, since I coded in a theme options page.

Simply select between either “dark” or “light” on the page to switch. It’s set to dark by default. If you’d like to change any specific colors, you can edit the dark.css or light.css files.

Conclusion

I think the theme turned out really well. Thanks again to Keith for participating in the theme battle and contributing the two designs to it. The “losing” Bravissimo PSD from theme battle #2 will be released soon.

This is the first gallery theme released here, so I’d love to know what you think of the Photabulous theme in the comments. If you have a support question, please post it in the forums.

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.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features in more detail…

Thumbnails

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.

• Featured Image – This image is displayed next to your featured post on the main index template. It should be sized at 350×250.
• Post Image – This image is displayed above the content on your single post pages. Thanks to the TimThumb script, a resized version is also used as the image under “Recent Posts” on your homepage.

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.

Widgets

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.

flickrRSS

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:

Conclusion

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.

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.

Live Demo | Download

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.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features in more detail…

Thumbnails

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.

• Featured Image – This image is displayed next to your featured post on the main index template. It should be sized at 350×250.
• Post Image – This image is displayed above the content on your single post pages. Thanks to the TimThumb script, a resized version is also used as the image under “Recent Posts” on your homepage.

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.

Widgets

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.

flickrRSS

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:

Conclusion

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.

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.

Live Demo | Download

Here’s the winner of theme battle #2. The Photabulous theme was designed by Keith as a gallery/photoblog theme of sorts, which I then coded to WordPress. This theme has four widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer, an alternate color scheme, along with a bunch of other features which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the rest of the features…

Thumbnails

Obviously a gallery theme like this makes use of thumbnail images. In order to cut down on the amount of thumbnails you would need to upload, I integrated the timthumb script into the theme. For single posts, you’ll need to upload one 467×350 image and place the absolute path to the image in the custom write panel.

Once that is done, timthumb will take that image and resize it for use on archive pages. If there’s no image specified, a placeholder image will be used on archive pages. No image will be displayed at all on the single post template.

Widgetized Areas

As mentioned above, this theme has four widgetized areas. Three of these are located in the footer: Footer One, Footer Two, and Footer Three. There is one widgetized area for each of the three columns. The fourth widgetized area is located on the 404 template, so you can edit what you’d like displayed on your 404 pages through the widgets panel.

Cufon Headings

The Titillium font is used for the blog title headings, page headings, as well as comment headings. Cufon, a fast text-replacement technique, is used to render this font on the theme.

Color Schemes

Included in the Photabulous WordPress theme is an alternate light color scheme. You might have caught a glimpse of it if you follow me on Twitter, where I tweeted the preview link a few times. Here’s a screenshot of it below.

Switching between the dark and light color schemes couldn’t be simpler, since I coded in a theme options page.

Simply select between either “dark” or “light” on the page to switch. It’s set to dark by default. If you’d like to change any specific colors, you can edit the dark.css or light.css files.

Conclusion

I think the theme turned out really well. Thanks again to Keith for participating in the theme battle and contributing the two designs to it. The “losing” Bravissimo PSD from theme battle #2 will be released soon.

This is the first gallery theme released here, so I’d love to know what you think of the Photabulous theme in the comments. If you have a support question, please post it in the forums.

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.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the other features in more detail…

Color Schemes

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.

Thanks to Andrea for suggesting these colors in this comment.

Theme Options

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.

Widgetized Areas

Like mentioned above, this theme has three widgetized areas. The sidebar, the header ad, and the 404 page.

Conclusion

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.

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.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the widgets, and other stuff…

Widgetized Areas

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.

Page Menu

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.

Conclusion

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.

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.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the rest of the features in more detail…

Featured Post

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.

Vertical Page Navigation

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.

Widget Areas

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.

Conclusion

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.