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Okay, The Simply Minimal theme is a theme I actually ported to WordPress myself. It’s the theme I currently use on my personal blog, Leland.info, and I released it for free due to popular demand. I’ve been getting a lot of emails and comments asking for support, even though I clearly stated it was an “as-is” theme and I wouldn’t offer support.

Since I’m a nice guy and don’t want to leave anyone hanging, I thought I would review this theme here. I’ll walk you through how to use all aspects of the Simply Minimal theme and hopefully answer any and all of your potential questions about it.

Read on to see the rest of the review…

Features

The most prominent feature of this theme would probably be the homepage template. It has room for a featured area at the top, plus a listing of your latest blog posts and tweets below.

Areas of the homepage template are controllable through a theme options page, which is gone over below. There are also threaded comments, and it won’t work in anything below WordPress 2.7.

Setting It Up

Installing this theme is pretty much like any other theme at first. The first step is to download the theme, unzip theme directory, and upload it to your /wp-content/themes/.

Once it’s uploaded, go ahead and activate it in Appearance → Themes within your WordPress administration panel.

This is what you should have so far on your blog’s homepage.

The Homepage Template

Hey, where’s the homepage template you see on my other blog? You’re going to need to do a few things to set that up.

The first thing to do is create a new page and use the Home Page Template. The page doesn’t need any content or anything like that. You’ll probably want to call the page something like “Home” but it doesn’t really matter.

Now that you’ve got a page called “Home” using the Home Page Template, you’re going to want to set that as your site’s actual homepage. You’re also going to want to create another page called “Blog” to set aside for your blog page.

Following instructions from a previous post here, You don’t need a blog on your front page, we’re going to do just that. Go to Settings → Reading and set your front page to “Home” and your posts page to “Blog.”

Once you’ve set your front page and posts page successfully, this is what your blog’s homepage should look like.

The text from the latest articles is taken from your excerpt, so if you notice there is too much text there, make sure to set an optional excerpt for your recent posts.

Unless you want a picture of Theme Lab, a feed of my personal Twitter account, you’ll probably want to change these things (and more) in the theme options page.

Theme Options Page

This is where you edit a few different aspects of the Simply Minimal theme, mostly involving the homepage template.

Top of Homepage

• Top Heading – This is where “Top Heading Here.” is currently displayed by default.
• Top Description – This is the text displayed right below the heading.
• Hire Me Now URL – This can be a link to a contact page or something similar. If specified, a “Hire Me Now” button will be displayed which is a link to the URL.
• Top Image Path – This will let you input the URL of a 434×232 image to display (instead of a screenshot of Theme Lab).

Bottom of Homepage

• Number of Latest Articles – Pretty self explanatory, this will allow you to control how many “latest articles” from your blog are displayed on your homepage. There are three listed by default.
• Twitter Username – Again, pretty self explanatory, just input your Twitter username here. As I mentiond above, my tweets will be displayed if you don’t, so do remember to change this setting.
• Number of Tweets – Pretty self explanatory once again. Put the number of tweets you want displayed on your homepage in this box. It defaults to three.

Sitewide

• Exclude Pages – If you’d like to exclude pages from your top menu, input their page ID numbers in a comma separated list in this box. For example if you want to exclude your “Home” page and “About” page and their ID numbers are 18 and 2 respectively, type this in: 18,2
• Host IE7.js script on your own domain – If you would rather have the IE7.js script hosted on your own domain (instead of Google) check this box. You probably won’t have to worry about this. Most people prefer to host it at Google since it saves on unnecessary bandwidth.
• Fix Blog Title Bug – If you don’t want to edit CSS and notice your full blog title isn’t showing up in the header, check off this box. More information in the “Known Bugs” section below.

Known Bugs

If you have more than one word in your blog title, you may notice anything past the first word gets cut off in your blog heading. If you notice a problem like this, open up your style.css file and comment out the width on the #header h1 selector.

Find this:

#header h1 {
/* background: url(images/simply-minimal-logo.gif) no-repeat; */
width: 262px;

And change it to this:

#header h1 {
/* background: url(images/simply-minimal-logo.gif) no-repeat;
width: 262px; */

This code is the remnants of how the original SimplyMinimal: Free XHTML/CSS Template was coded with an image logo instead of text, which I changed during the WordPress conversion.

It is recommended you change the CSS manually instead of using the “Fix Blog Title Bug” on the theme options page, which is there for those who can’t edit code for whatever reason.

If there are any other bugs, feel free to let me know.

Conclusion

Hope any current (and future) users of the Simply Minimal WordPress theme got some use out of this review post. The instructions I currently had up were pretty rushed and beginning WP users may have had trouble understanding what I was talking about.

By the way, a new version of Simply Minimal was just released as a result of something I discovered reviewing my own theme. The top image on the homepage template was hardcoded in. I meant to make it so that could be edited by a theme options page but I guess I forgot about it during the final release.

I also added a theme option under “Sitewide” that will allow you to fix the blog title bug by just checking a button. It is slightly hacky and it’s recommended you edit the CSS instead if you’re able, like I described above.

Those upgrading will have to upload a new functions.php and header.php file, although it probably won’t be necessary unless you really want those two new options. Newcomers can just install and set up the theme normally.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think of the theme below. Would you like to see more themes like this?

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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.

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.

I came across Martín Fernández’s website a while back, and noticed it was using a modified version of the Lightweight theme. Check out what he did with it below.

As you can see, it’s still a light theme with a slightly different color scheme. It really works great to showcase his graphics work.

I got in touch with Martín and he agreed to let me release his modified WordPress theme here on Theme Lab. I converted it to a child theme, so the only things in the file are a stylesheet and a screeenshot. Download it here. Check out the demo here.

Make sure you know how to install a child theme, so you’ll need the Lightweight theme uploaded as well as the Ligher child theme. Activate “Lighter” in your WordPress admin.

Another couple weeks have gone by, so here’s another set of WordPress weekend resources.

How to disable scripts and styles – In this post, Justin Tadlock goes over how to disable scripts and styles added to your WordPress sites by plugins. This has a number of uses, for example if you don’t want the Contact Form 7 stylesheet to load on other pages besides your “Contact” page.

10 Most Wanted Category Hacks and Plugins for WordPress – This post over at WPBeginner goes over several useful hacks related to WordPress categories. Learn how to use category icons, exclude certain categories from your menus, and more.

Top 5 WordPress Security Tips You Most Likely Don’t Follow – This post by Brad Williams over at WPTavern goes over a number of useful WordPress security tips, such as not using the admin account. Some people in the comments mention that some of these methods are “security through obscurity” although the tips are useful nonetheless.

WLTC Contest WordPress Plugins – This is a list of plugins submit to the Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition of 2009. Some very interesting plugins are included such as the One Time Password plugin, and a bunch of Twitter-related plugins. All of them are up for download.

Thanks for reading. If you know of any other recently published WordPress resources, let me know.

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Custom Theme is a project I’ve been working on for about a month now. Basically, I’m going to offer an affordable custom WordPress theme development service.

I’ve received a number of inquiries through Theme Lab asking if I offered custom theme design services. I’ve had to turn down these requests because, to put it simply, I don’t design.

I do code though, so when I came across the opportunity to acquire this perfect domain name, I decided to partner with a designer and offer a service like this.

The designer is Peter Mark of Hive Designs. You may know him as the designer of the Theme Lab theme (the one I’m currently using) as well as a few free themes here.

So, at these prices I’m expecting to get a lot of orders. If you want a custom WordPress theme, be sure to check out the site and make your order soon.