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I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about the Builder theme by iThemes. I’ve been hearing about how innovative it is, and how easy it is to make a lot of different layouts with this one theme.

I managed to get my hands on a copy, and you lucky Theme Lab readers will now get to see just how easy it is to set up your own Builder-theme-powered site. In this review, I’ll go over:

• An initial overview of the Builder theme, including set up and the various theme options
• How to use Builder’s custom layout feature and how to apply it to your pages

Check out the rest of the review after the jump.

Setting It Up

Initially installing Builder is just like any other theme. Once you get the zip file, just extract the “Builder” folder and upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Activate it in the “Appearance” section of your admin panel.

This is what Builder will look like on a plain WordPress install. As you can see, right now it looks pretty plain. Basically just your blog surrounded by a ton of widgetized areas to the top, right, and bottom.

Overview of Settings

You’ll notice a new menu in your dashboard entitled “My Theme” after activating the Builder theme. Unlike admin menus added by themes from other companies which include their logos and such, themes from iThemes appear to have completely unbranded menus. This can be useful if you’re setting up sites for a client.

Start Here – This is a page with links to unbranded iThemes video tutorials, which I believe may be included in every iThemes theme. If you would rather replace this page, there is a tutorial link titled: How to change this Tutorials ‘Start Here’ page to your own custom URL.

Settings – I noticed in the original set up there was just a Home link and no other page or category links visible. This page will let you include you build your navigation menu with a choice of page and category links.

After you’ve set up your widget areas, you can also turn off the rest of the blank widget areas you’re not using (remember the original screenshot where they’re all displayed, for identification purposes).

You can insert tracking code (such as for Google Analytics) and place it in the header or footer. More often then not, this code is placed in the footer, which is the default setting.

Also there are a few SEO options, such as using post tags for meta keywords and disabling indexing of category archives. Both of these SEO options are turned on by default.

All in all the settings are pretty straightforward, nothing too overwhelming.

Custom Layouts

Now, what you’ve all been waiting for. This custom layout engine is really what sets Builder apart from other ordinary themes. Instead of showing a bunch of screenshots with text, I thought it would be better to create a quick Screenr video to demonstrate how to create a layout and use it within the Builder theme.

The one column layout I did in the video was pretty simple, but remember all the possibilities with different combinations of modules, widgets, etc.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Builder did what I expected: easily build layouts directly from the admin panel, and without editing code. One thing which I would like to see would be a style editor with the ease of use similar to the layout builder. Maybe even something on a layout-by-layout basis. Even though I value consistency, having different styles on different pages may be a good option to have.

From what I hear, Builder may have a simple style manager coming soon which allows for easy edits of universal style elements, such as fonts, colors, and things like that. When this is done I think it could really benefit all you “noncoders” out there.

Pricing – The Builder theme costs $127, and I know that may seem pretty expensive especially compared to other paid themes which rarely exceed $75. Keep in mind these things though.

• Since the theme is licensed under the GPL, you can use this theme on as many sites you want with no restrictions.
• Since the theme is so flexible, you can use this one theme as a base for a number of completely different sites.

Conclusion

Please note this post is riddled with affiliate links. If you don’t want me to make money, you can always go directly to iThemes.com to buy the Builder theme.

This is my second review of a paid theme (with the first being Aperturious). I know most people visit this site through search engines and such looking for free WordPress themes, however I would like to start throwing paid WP themes in the mix soon, whether it be affiliates, or maybe even direct sales (hint hint).

Anyway, hope you liked the review. I’d really love to hear your thoughts on the Builder theme in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Arthemia WordPress Theme Review
2. Guzel Magazine WordPress Theme Review
3. Aperturious WordPress Theme Review

Aperturious is a paid WordPress theme designed by Chris Wallace, who you may know from the Gallery theme that I reviewed earlier this year. The theme is available for purchase through ThemeForest for $25.

I’ll be reviewing the theme in a review post, including how to set it up and an overview of the features.

And now onto the review…

Setting it Up

After uploading and activating the theme, I got this on my freshly installed WordPress site:

According to the included readme document, you’ll also have to set the /cache/ folder to 777 so TimThumb can save cached thumbnail images. Depending on your host, additional requirements may be necessary in order to get TimThumb working.

Theme Options

The Aperturious theme options lets you switch between three different color schemes, choose layout options, toggle post info display, and insert advertisement codes. A screenshot is below:

Instead of going through the options one by one and saving screenshots, I decided to make a quick screencast video to cycle through all the various options.

I’m not sure what the “Post Info Display” option is supposed to display exactly, but as you could see in the video I didn’t notice any difference on the homepage or category page whether it was turned on or off.

Background Images

While adding a post, you can optionally add a background image which is resized by the TimThumb script. The recommended size is 618×240. With the right images you can get a really nice custom effect on a selection of posts.

Conclusion

All in all I think this is a quality theme, although I would expect nothing less from Chris who has a track record of releasing interesting and unique themes. It would be great for portfolios and such, especially with custom images defined for each post. The optional background image on each post can be a very nice touch provided you select appropriate pictures.

I should let you know the links in this post are referral links of mine to ThemeForest, so I would get a commission on your deposit should you choose to sign up and purchase this theme. This is my first time reviewing a paid theme with an affiliate link here, although I’ll try to mix it up between free and paid themes for future reviews.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and hope you found this review informative. Let me know what you think in the comments. Remember, you can purchase the Aperturious theme for $25 at ThemeForest.

Related posts:

1. Snapshot WordPress Theme Review
2. Arthemia WordPress Theme Review
3. eBusiness WordPress Theme Review

Slidefolio is a free gallery WordPress theme, with posts displayed in a slideshow format. The theme was developed by Nick Berlette.

Read on to find out how to use this theme, along with my thoughts…

Setting It Up

The first step to installing the Slidefolio theme is just like installing any other WordPress theme. Download Slidefolio from the link above, extract and upload the “slidefolio” directory to your wp-content/themes/ directory, and activate.

After activating, you should have something like this:

Looking a little empty, so why don’t we start adding content?

Adding Content

Creating posts with built-in slideshows in the Slidefolio theme is surprisingly simple. Just upload one or a batch of photos to a post, and a slideshow is automatically created. Just to demonstrate, I decided to make this quick Screenr video.

Pretty cool, huh?

Theme Options

There is a simple theme options page which will allow you to upload an image logo to use (instead of the default text logo with your blog’s name)

Pretty self-explanatory.

Conclusion

Hope you all found this theme review useful. I haven’t seen the Slidefolio theme covered on any other blogs, so if you didn’t find it over at Nick’s blog, this is probably the first you’re hearing about it.

Is there a market for simple slideshow themes like this? I suppose it could also be used as a WordPress theme for photographers as well. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Simply Minimal WordPress Theme Review
2. Gallery WordPress Theme Review
3. Red Carpet WordPress Theme Review

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?

I came across YummThemes the other day, and I’ll be honest with you, I actually thought it was a joke. No theme demos or screenshots, just a big bag of money, a promise of getting a “shit load of money” shot at me with a “very big gun” and an email newsletter signup form. Reluctantly, I signed up to the newsletter out of curiosity.

A couple days later, they sent everyone a free theme to everyone on their newsletter. I was impressed by the screenshot of the theme, and with some questions surrounding their legitimacy, I decided to give this theme a try and post the results in a review post.

And now onto the rest of the review…

Setting It Up

After installing and activating the theme, you should get something like this.

The first thing I noticed was there was a fat footer that was noticeably empty. Same thing with the blue sidebar are below the “Join Our RSS” button. Good thing is, these are widgetized areas, and you can add to them later.

Widget Areas

There are three widgetized areas in this theme. One in the sidebar, and two in the footer (left and right). You will probably need to add at least one widget to each of the three widget areas so the theme won’t look “empty.”

I added the following widgets to the widget areas in the screenshot below.

To get an idea of what they look like and where they show up on a live site, here’s what I got below.

As you can see, it’s pretty easy to fill up the widget areas with appropriate widgets in this theme, especially in WordPress 2.8. This doesn’t make the theme “broken” although it may be nice to have some defaults assigned if there are no widgets active.

Theme Options

This theme options page is pretty sad, although there’s really not much you would need to configure with a standard blog-style theme like this anyway.

Basically this page lets you input specific page ID’s to include in the navigation menus. There is a small typo though. The “Top Menu” (where it has a link to Uncategorized in the screenshot above) is for categories, not pages. Instead of page IDs, you would input the category IDs you’d want to include instead.

Unless you have an insane amount of pages and/or categories, you probably won’t need to use this theme options page at all. I think if anything, it would probably make more sense to have an option to exclude links, rather than include them.

Conclusion

If you want this theme, I would suggest signing up to their newsletter ASAP. Not sure if they are nearing the cap or not. It’s free to join and they might share the download link again. It is supposed to be a paid theme, although I guess this is just one of the pre-launch goodies for subscribers. It really can’t hurt to sign up to their newsletter.

I know these new kids on the block caused quite a stir on the interwebs with their silly marketing tactics, although in the end, who cares? If they can get people talking, and provide quality themes that people are willing to pay for, I’d say that’s a job well done.

Will you be signing up to their newsletter (if you haven’t already) or has this “debacle” completely turned you off to any future YummThemes? Do you think this whole “debacle” is ridiculously overblown? Remember people, we’re talking about WordPress themes.

Elegant Themes never ceases to amaze me with their feature-packed, great looking, and affordable themes. eBusiness is the latest theme from the theme club. This theme is ideal for those looking for a WordPress CMS-style theme for their website, while still maintaining some blog functionality.

In this review post, I’ll be going over my experience with this theme, including setting it up and how to use it to run a business CMS site, as well as a blog.

And now onto the review…

Setting It Up

First you’ll need to be a member of the Elegant Themes club ($19.95 per year) to download the theme. You’ll notice the download is around 30 megabytes in a zip file, however most of the file size is made up of the Photoshop sources which won’t need to be uploaded to your WordPress site.

All you need to upload is the /eBusiness/ directory to /wp-content/themes/ as well as the two plugins included in the zip to /wp-content/plugins/. Here’s what your site will look like on a fresh WordPress installation.

Remember, I just installed this WordPress and haven’t added any posts or pages yet. The tabs along the top with respective filler content under items like “Welcome to eBusiness,” “About Our Company,” and “Our Services” are already included with the theme. These can be changed later in the eBusiness theme options page.

Theme Options Page

Since this is such an extensive theme control panel, instead of writing about it, I decided to make a quick video tour. Click to watch it below.

As a quick recap, here’s what the different tabs do:

• Layout: Let’s you control the blog skin and color choices (9 different options), website structure (page based or blog based), as well as “about us” content.
• Homepage: Applicable when “page based” is selected in the previous tab. Let’s you control which pages are displayed on the homepage (maximum of 4), as well as the slider content (maximum of 3).
• Blog Setup: This lets you control how the blog looks, hide or display certain items, as well as set thumbnail size and quality.
• Navigation: Controls page and category navigation. You can exclude items, choose how to sort them, and disable the “Home” and “Blog” links if you wish.
• Manage Ads: This lets you control how many 125×125 ads are displayed (6 maximum), as well as the image and link. Also allows you to enable the 468×60 ad (displayed on top right) and lets you specify where it’s linked to as well.

There’s also a nice overview on this eBusiness theme release post at Elegant Themes.

Alternate Skins

As I mentioned above, this theme has three different skins, along with three color schemes each, making for a total of nine different options to choose from. If you watched the video, you would see how easy it is to change the look of your entire site with just a few clicks.

Earthen has a grungy look and comes in red, blue, and purple.

Radiate, my personal favorite, has a more professional look, and comes in blue, green, and red.

Smooth has a darker, smoother look and comes in blue, green, and pink.

Conclusion

The theme options page is easy to navigate and understand, and is a big improvement over the last Elegant Theme I reviewed, Influx. The built-in ad management is also a nice touch, but I’m wondering if people who use other types of ads such as Adsense would have trouble integrating that with the theme.

Also, in my last Elegant Theme review, I had a section titled Things I Would Do Differently. While the Gravatars are now built-in to the theme, unfortunately I could not find any WordPress tag support whatsoever. I realize this is primarily a business theme and most people probably wouldn’t need it, however it wouldn’t hurt to add, and all it would take is adding the following line somewhere between the Loop in single.php to have them displayed on single posts.

<?php the_tags('<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>

All in all, this is an excellent theme which would be great for a page-based business site, as well as a standalone blog. This theme alone is worth the $19.95 per year, except with Elegant Themes, you get access to not just eBusiness plus all of their other great themes.