E.Share

Today we have another awesome free WordPress theme, which I ported from a Styleshout template. It’s more or less a pretty standard blog design with a bunch of widgetized areas (mostly in the footer), threaded comments support, and post thumbnail integration, among other things.

Let’s get into the features in more detail.

FlickrRSS Support

If you have the FlickrRSS plugin installed, you can configure it to show your various Flickr photos. This will show up in your footer (above all the normal widgets).

This plugin is optional and will not break anything if you don’t want Flickr photos to show up.

Post Thumbnail Support

Like the SongSpace theme, this theme makes use of WordPress’ built-in post-thumbnail feature.

Since post thumbnails were introduced in 2.9, you’ll need to at least WordPress 2.9 to run this theme.

Archives Template

Like other Styleshout ported themes including Jungleland and FreshPick, Cool Blue has an archive template that differs from the usual index template.

I used the same template on the search results pages too.

Social Bookmarking

On single post pages I integrated the social bookmarking section available in the original Styleshout template.

Thanks go to Jeff Star of PerishablePress for the fully valid, SEO-friendly social media links for WordPress and also to the Sociable plugin (for LinkedIn and NewsVine).

To enable the e-mail icon, you’ll need to install the WP Email plugin by Lester Chan.

Opacity Hover Effect on Social Icons

I had some feedback from a beta tester, Muhammad Haris, who suggested that the icons would look good if they were set to 80% opacity by default and 100% on hover.

While I don’t like to mess too much with ported theme code, it’s actually pretty simple if you really want to. Just add the following lines in your style.css file:

.share-box a img{
	filter:alpha(opacity=80);
	-moz-opacity:0.8;
	-khtml-opacity: 0.8;
	opacity: 0.8;
}
.share-box a:hover img{
	filter:alpha(opacity=100);
	-moz-opacity:1;
	-khtml-opacity: 1;
	opacity: 1;
}

If a browser doesn’t support the opacity feature, don’t worry about it, the images will just show up as normal. Of course you can change all the 80’s and .8’s in the first part to whatever percentage you see fit.

Threaded Comments

The original template had a threaded comments design built-in, so I integrated it with a custom callback (plus a few CSS changes).

Widgetized Stuff

The Cool Blue WordPress theme has six widgetized areas. One in the sidebar, four in the footer (for each column), and one on the 404 template.

Pictured above is the fat, fully widgetized footer included in the Cool Blue theme.

To handle the “Updates” part, I coded in a custom widget to input your feed URL, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, and E-mail subscription URL. I’d recommend you place it in the “Footer One” widget area.

Thanks to WP Engineer for the code.

No Theme Options Page

That’s right, this is a feature. Why? Because I really couldn’t think of a good reason to include one that couldn’t be better accomplished by a separate plugin. Expect a follow up (opinion) post regarding this soon.

Conclusion

The Styleshout ports are easily the most downloaded themes here, although my download counter has been busted ever since I upgraded to 2.8 so I’m not 100% sure if anyone has overtaken them. I doubt it.

Hope you all like the theme, let me know what you think in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Keep It Simple – Free WordPress Theme
2. Blue World – Free WordPress Theme
3. TechJunkie – Free WordPress Theme

It’s been a long time since I’ve released a Thematic child theme. This one is called Astatic, and it’s designed to be a very minimalistic WordPress blog theme with posts formatted in two columns on index pages.

If you remember how to install a child theme, you also need to have Thematic uploaded to your /wp-content/themes/ directory, but activate Astatic.

Notes

• I removed several elements through the functions.php file. I could’ve used display: none; to disable them through CSS, but that kinda freaks me out.
• The blog title will show up wrapped in an H1 tag on non-singular pages. On singular pages, the post title uses the H1 tag. This is to keep the SEO crazies happy since I removed the blog description (see above note) which usually handles the H1 stuff.
• The posts on the index pages are styled in two columns on index pages through the .not-singular selector. Credits go to the body_class function.
• Only three files included in the child theme: screenshot.png, functions.php, and style.css. No images are used in the design at all.

I tried to make the code in functions.php pretty well commented so you can hopefully figure out what’s going on there. I may do a follow up post on my development process.

Credits

Every time I make a new Thematic child theme is a learning experience. Here are a few resources I used to help me out:

• ThemeShaper Forums – This place has a wealth of useful info in their archives. Tip: Use a site specific Google search followed by your query (i.e. site:themeshaper.com/forums/ child theme question).
• The Right Way to Override Theme Functions – A nice tutorial on overriding Thematic functions. This information was probably gone over in some post in the Thematic forums (see above) too.
• Useful Thematic Filters – This post has a nice list of useful Thematic filters (like the title would suggest).

There are also a lot of good info on the ThemeShaper blog, particularly through the How To Modify WordPress Themes The Smart Way series.

Conclusion

Hope you all like the design. It all started when I coded this when I was bored, then I decided to turn it into a Thematic child theme.

Most of you who have seen my “designs” know that there are very few images, mostly because I suck at making them in Photoshop. Hence, they are almost always pure CSS.

I know it’s really simple but I’m sure it could come in handy for something. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Dissecting Astatic – Thematic Child Theme Tutorial
2. Braintied – Free Thematic Child Theme
3. Monochromatic – A Thematic Child Theme

Premium law wordpress theme, law, lawyer, attorney, legal, court, judge, simple, light

SmackThemes.com

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.