E.Share

Today’s free WordPress theme is designed by Roshan of CSSHeaven.org (you might know him from his RamblingSoul themes). I ported the static template to WordPress and packed it with WordPress 3.0-specific features, including custom menus, headers, and backgrounds. More on that below.

WordPress 3.0 Menus

As stated above, this theme includes WordPress 3.0 menu support which means you have very flexible control over what links show up in your header menu. If you don’t set up a menu, it will default back to a list of WordPress pages.

For further reading on implementing the WordPress 3.0 menu feature into your own themes, I found these links really helpful:

• Goodbye headaches, hello menus! – A write-up by Justin Tadlock on WordPress 3.0 menus.
• wp_nav_menu – The official WordPress codex on the function used for the menus.

Custom Header

If you want to get rid of the red header image displayed directly below the nav menu, the custom header feature is for you. You’ll need an image 980 pixels wide and 170 pixels high to replace it. If it’s smaller than that, the CSS is coded to position the background image in the center of the div.

For more information on implementing this in your own theme, I found the add_custom_image_header page on the WordPress codex very useful, although I modified it a bit so it doesn’t load styles in the header, just an inline background image declaration on the “header” div.

Of course, feel free to check out the code in header.php and functions.php to see how exactly I did it.

Custom Background

If you want to customize the background image and get rid of the greenish background image currently used, use this feature.

This is by far the easiest feature to implement in a theme, thanks to WP Engineer for the one line code you need to add to your theme’s functions.php file.

add_custom_background();

You also need a wp_head() hook in your header so the internal stylesheet that handles the custom background styles can be embedded.

Custom Thumbnails

As you can see on index/archive/search pages, the posts are laid out in a gallery format. For this, I decided to use the built-in WordPress thumbnail system. It will automatically crunch the images to 270×140.

Thanks to Mark Jaquith’s tutorial for information on integrating this feature into the theme.

Widgets

Like almost all the other themes here, Green Tea is widget ready. The widgetized areas are the sidebar, left footer, right footer, and 404 page.

Conclusion

This should probably go without saying, but you’re going to need to be running WordPress 3.0 for this theme to not spit out a bunch of errors. It’s not backwards compatible, and I did this on purpose to help force people to upgrade to the latest version (which you should be doing anyway).

The reason I chose this particular template because it seemed to have as many elements that I could use to integrate WordPress 3.0 specific features. While I wouldn’t necessarily use these features on my own sites, I can see the value if you’re developing themes for public release or clients.

WordPress 3.0 menu integration is pretty much a must for those, as it makes things so much easier for users in customizing links in menus versus the old way: page lists, category lists, or hard-coded menus. Depending on the design, custom headers would be nice and to some extent, maybe even custom backgrounds (although I’m not a huge fan of this one).

Thanks to Max Luzuriaga for the suggestion of the Green Tea name which I got on Twitter.

Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, I’d love to hear your feedback!

License: Everything is licensed under the GPL, the original template (including CSS and artwork) and the WordPress portion.

Related posts:

1. WP Clean & Green – Free WordPress Theme
2. RS16 – Free WordPress Theme
3. RS11 – Free WordPress Theme

Finally, presenting the winner of theme battle #3. Tasty Showcase was a template designed by Brad of DemusDesign, who also coded it in XHTML/CSS/JS. I then took the coded template and ported it to WordPress. It has a ton of widgetized areas, including widgetized footers (plural).

Read on to see the features, including how to use the slider, in more detail…

The Slider

Displayed on the homepage, this Karmic Flow powered slider will display your four latest posts with a custom image should you choose.

Once you have a custom image sized 653×367 (653 pixels wide, 367 pixels high) simply input the absolute URL to the image in the built-in custom write panel.

If you don’t have an image, the theme will automatically use one of the placeholder images (depending on which slot it is) if you don’t specify one yourself. That means even if you don’t have any images, there will still be a different picture for each one.

Widgetized Areas

This theme is chock-full of widgetized areas, 14 to be exact. Here’s where they are, and what they do:

• Sidebar – Four areas, one full width above, two half widths, and one full width below
• Footer – Five areas, one for each column
• Home Footer – Four areas, one for each column
• 404 Template – One area, so you can customize your 404 pages

Keep in mind the “Home Footer” areas are only used on the homepage (where the slider is). The rest of the footer widget areas are controlled through the “Footer” ones, and affect every other page on the site besides the homepage.

The above diagram shows all the “Sidebar” and “Footer” widget areas. Not pictured are the “Home Footer” areas (basically the same place as the regular footer, except on the homepage) and the 404 template widget areas.

Conclusion

I bet you all forgot about theme battles, didn’t you? I know it was a few months between the conclusion of the voting and the release of the winning theme (this one) but better late than never.

Brad from DemusDesign was kind enough to code this one into XHTML/CSS and integrated the Javascript for the slider even though I usually code the winning theme battle themes myself. This time I just did the WordPress portion. You can get the static (non-WordPress) version on his site.

I’d also like to thank Cristian Antohe of Cozmos Labs for spotting a bug on the theme via Twitter. Also a special thanks to Omar Corrales of Slimmity who tested the theme himself and provided some good feedback, including several bug fixes before the release.

Anyway, since the time RS16 was released, I got the forums back online (with a matching bbPress theme) so if you have any support questions, they go there.

Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, I’d really love to hear your feedback.

Related posts:

1. Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme
2. Newsworthy – Free WordPress Theme
3. RS11 – Free WordPress Theme

It’s been a while since our last free WordPress theme. This one is designed by Roshan from Rambling Soul, who has recently returned to designing free templates after a long absence. This theme has a number of interesting features, which will be gone over below.

Read on to check out the features in more detail…

Image-Based Page Navigation

Roshan designed this template with a set of button-style image links for the page navigation. I wanted to make sure there was an easy way to choose which image you wanted to use on a page-by-page basis, so I coded in a custom write panel to make it easier.

• – home
• – works
• – blog
• – downloads
• – blog

Simply type in the name of the corresponding image listed on the right, on the write menu on each page. If nothing is specified, the “works” image will be used (which is why there’s a paintbrush on every other page besides About).

The code used to display the image links through custom fields was heavily modified from the WordPress Menu Tricks article at ThemeShaper, take a look at the functions.php file in the theme if you’re curious.

Widgetized Areas

There are only two widgetized areas in this entire theme. One widgetized area is on the 404 template, in case you want to customize your 404 page from the WordPress admin.

The second is called “Homepage Top” and located on top of the index page, so you can customize the information displayed there.

WP-PageNavi Integration

This theme is integrated with the WP-PageNavi plugin. Simply install it to get super cool numbered pagination on your index, archive, and search pages. Otherwise you’ll get normal previous/next pagination links.

Twitter Integration

Your latest tweet is displayed at the bottom of each page in the RS16 theme after you input your Twitter username in your user profile. This Twitter input box located at the bottom of: Users → Your Profile.

Thanks to Justin Tadlock for the code to add and use custom user profile fields.

Multiple Background Images

Roshan included four different post background images with different colors. Adding onto the custom write panel made for the page navigation links is a way to define an alternate background color to posts and pages, if you choose.

The different color choices are: green, gray, brown, pink. If no color is defined, the default color is green.

Thanks to WPRecipes for the code on how to get custom fields outside the loop.

Conclusion

Hope you all like the theme, despite the unconventional page navigation. It’s worth noting that there is another set of text-based page navigation located in the footer. If you want more Rambling Soul templates which I’ve ported, check out this tag page for the full collection.

Not many people have noticed, but the support forums have been closed ever since the new design was launched. Not only so I can create a matching bbPress theme for it, but also wanted to set aside some time to clean up all the spam accounts which are cluttering up the database. Hardly anyone uses it anyway, so hopefully the few that do can be patient while I set that up again.

With that said, feel free to let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, including support-related questions if you notice anything that’s off.

Related posts:

1. Bamboo – Free WordPress Theme
2. Internet Hosting – Free WordPress Theme
3. Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme

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