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

Today we have yet another a ported WordPress theme originally designed by Roshan of Rambling Soul. It’s pretty much just a standard blog theme with three widgetized areas (404, sidebar, intro text) and threaded comments.

Related posts:

1. RS11 – Free WordPress Theme
2. WP Rambling Soul 7 – Free WordPress Theme
3. Spotlight Blog – Free WordPress Theme

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

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features…

Home Page Template

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.

• Column Heading - What’s displayed as the heading for each column.
• Column Text - A short blurb of text to be displayed below the heading.
• Column Image - The full path image you want displayed, aligned to the left. If no image is specified, no image will be displayed.
• Read More - If you want a “Read More” link, simply input the full URL to the page you want it to link to. Nothing will be displayed if not specified.

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.

Widget Areas

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.

Page Navigation

This theme is great if you have a decent number of pages. There are three different page navigation menus in this theme.

• Top Menu - This menu is at the very top of the theme to the right of the sidebar.
• Sub Menu - This menu is also located in the header, positioned directly below the top menu inside the blue background.
• Footer Menu - This menu is located in the footer, right below the copyright message.

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.

Conclusion

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.

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.

Live Demo | Download

And now more information on the theme options page, custom page templates, and more…

Theme Options

Like I mentioned above, the RS14 has a theme options page, on which you can control a number of layout-related options. Here’s a screenshot:

Now, let me explain what each of the options does exactly.

Header

• Exclude Pages: Pretty self explanatory. If you have any top level pages you would like to exclude from the page navigation menu, simply input a comma separated list of page ID numbers here.
• Include Home Link: Disabled by default. This might be useful if you have a main index of posts on your front page and want the “Home” link to show up in your page navigation.
• Page ID of First Link: If you have the “Home” link disabled, you might want to input the page ID of the first page that shows up in your list here. This will eliminate the left border on the first link of the page menu.
• Right Description: Overrides the text where you currently see “Put a Nice Little Description Here.” Can use <span class='bigger'> for bigger text. Make sure to use single quotes.
• Right Box Title: Overrides the green title which currently says “Put Some Contents Here” over in the box on the right side of the header.
• Right Box Text: Overrides the text that is currently inside the box on the right side of the header.
• Right Box Read More Link: Disabled by default. Enter a full URL in here if you want a “Read More” link to appear.

Main

• Main Index Heading: This will override what currently says “latest news” on the main index page. Can use <span class='green'> for green text. Make sure it’s in single quotes.
• Sidebar Heading: This will override what currently says “browser news” on the blog’s sidebar. Can use <span class='green'> for green text. Make sure it’s in single quotes.

Custom Page Templates

As mentioned above, this theme has two custom page templates included. There is a “two column sidebar” template along with a “three column sidebar” template. These are used if you would rather not have the default sidebar on your static pages, which usually display the category and archive lists (or whatever you set your widgets to). You can see these page templates in action on the demo site.

The first step is to select which custom page template you’d like to use from the “Template” dropdown list on the left. Both of these are configured through custom write panels available on the Add New Page menu. Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s what the options mean:

• Page Heading Override: This option lets you override the page title. Can use <span class='green'> for green text. This also works on regular page templates as well.
• Sidebar Heading: This option lets you override the sidebar headings on the custom page templates. Can use <span class='green'> for green text.
• Column Thumbnails: If you want to use a thumbnail in a certain column, input the full URL to it here. Below are some included thumbnail images you can use.
• Column Titles: This is where you put the title to the columns.
• Column Text: This is where you put the content for the various columns.
• Column Read More: If you want a “read more” link displayed, enter the URL you want to link to here.

If you’re using the “Two Columns” template, you can ignore all the options which refer to “Three Columns” and vice versa.

Remember, you don’t need a blog on your front page, and that is especially true for this theme. I currently have the “Three Column Sidebar” template set up on my homepage with some thumbnail images included in the theme.

Included Images

If you want some generic thumbnail images to use in your posts, and custom sidebars, there are a few included in the theme.

Image	URL
	http://yourwordpressurl/wp-content/themes/wp-rs14/images/img1.gif
	http://yourwordpressurl/wp-content/themes/wp-rs14/images/img2.gif
	http://yourwordpressurl/wp-content/themes/wp-rs14/images/img3.gif
	http://yourwordpressurl/wp-content/themes/wp-rs14/images/product1.gif
	http://yourwordpressurl/wp-content/themes/wp-rs14/images/product2.gif
	http://yourwordpressurl/wp-content/themes/wp-rs14/images/product3.gif

There are also a couple pictures of Tony Montana and Vito Corleone, but you probably wouldn’t want to use those on a professinal business site. You can check those out on the “About” page of the RS14 demo site.

Widget Areas

As mentioned above, there are two widgetized sidebars with one on the left and one on the right. These are visible on the main index, single posts, archives, search results, and normal page templates. In addition to the two widgetized sidebars, there is also a widgetized 404 page.

Conclusion

For those following me on Twitter, thanks for being so patient. I know I’ve been tweeting about this theme for a couple weeks now, but I just wanted to make sure everything was ready before it was released. This may not be my most advanced theme coding-wise, but it probably is options-wise. I actually had to set up a whole new demo site for this theme, which is a first for me.

This theme took me a long time to port and get everything right, coding in all the CMS theme features and such. I have been listening to your feedback and I hope this isn’t just another “boring blog theme” although I will try to mix it up between CMS themes and blog themes in the future.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this theme in the comments. Although, if you have any support-related questions, please post them in the forums and not ask via e-mail.

Oh yeah, and there’s some big news tomorrow. Some of you who have been following this blog for at least a year might know what I’m talking about, so if you do - try to keep it a secret.