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

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.