A Smart WordPress 3.0 Theme

As mentioned before Smarter theme was designed as a powerful CMS for company websites. It’s a business wordpress theme, with a SEO friendly structure.

This being said, here are some of the new things that Smarter 2.0 has to offer.

The News Items was implemented using the custom post type feature from WP 3.0. Now, adding and editing news is simple and straight forward, leaving no room for confusion.

The custom navigation menu has been set as the theme default menu, so now you will be able to insert and organize things like pages, categories, news or custom links in your theme menu.

Smarter also comes with a big package of different color child themes, giving you the option to choose the right color range for your business.

In case you’re aiming for a multilingual website, Smarter 2.0 has been tested and works great with WPML plugin.

Smarter Theme Options, which let you customize your site looks, comes with a lighter interface which includes all the options from the previous version. So you have options like: selecting between multiple theme layouts, uploading a header image, editing the featured slider page etc.

To find out more about Smarter 2.0 and it’s new features check out the screencast below:

Pricing

For 25$ you can purchase Smarter 2.0, which includes all the functionality of the old version, plus the new features mentioned before. The zip also includes the psd files and the color child themes. Being released under a GPL license, Smarter can be used on an unlimited number of websites.

Support

If you have any suggestions or questions regarding the new version of this theme, please visit our forums (http://cozmoslabs.com/forums/).

Related posts:

1. Smarter WordPress Theme
2. Smarter Theme Teaser
3. Green anyone? Try Commune – Thematic Child Theme!

When I started designing Charisma I had in mind an elegant, simple, well structured theme which highlights the content and gives the user a pleasurable reading experience.

Charisma, Free Genesis Child Theme

The home page has a beautiful slider, and below it lists the most recent post titles. I created a new widget area that appears only on the homepage and you can add the default featured articles widget or featured page widget from Genesis Theme Framework.

So why Genesis you might ask? To be honest I wanted to experiment with frameworks other then Thematic to see how they work. I’ve used bits from Hybrid in the past and this is how I’ve tested Genesis, by building a child theme for it.

To be honest I was pleasantly surprised. The code is really easy to understand, there are plenty of tutorials on the support forums, the css is straight forward and the html really let’s you create any layout without any problems. I’ve also liked the widgets Genesis comes with by default. They speed up things quite a lot.

Charisma was built on top of the Genesis framework, so it inherits all it’s functionality. In order to install it you have to buy the Genesis Theme (this is an affiliate link), upload both themes (Charisma and Genesis) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the Charisma theme.

Support

If you have any question regarding this theme you can always visit the Cozmoslabs forums for help (www.cozmoslabs.com/forums/forum/charisma).

However, for questions regarding the Genesis Theme Framework please make use of the excellent support StudioPress provides.

Related posts:

1. Byty the Free Child Theme – Built on Thematic
2. Green anyone? Try Commune – Thematic Child Theme!
3. Early Morning Child Theme

Themes in the Work

The last two months have been really productive. So I thought I’d share with you two of the works in progress. While still far from ready to be released, they are ready to be shown.

Both will be child themes, but with a twist. This is as much as I can tell you at this point, but I’ll post more details by the end of the month.

Charisma Teaser

TypeLog Teaser

Related posts:

1. Charisma, Free Genesis Child Theme
2. Smarter WordPress Theme
3. Early Morning Child Theme

A Smart WordPress Theme

It gives your blog a personal look, with easy customization, without getting lost into too much options.
Its friendly interface and design work together giving your readers a pleasant experience every time they visit your site. Besides, you can get the most out of it’s SEO friendly structure by using the all in one seo pack plugin.

Pricing

For 25$ you can purchase Smarter, which includes the psd files.
Smarter is released under GPL license and that means you can use it on an unlimited number of websites.

Smarter theme options include:

• multiple theme layout
• optional use of breadcrumbs
• logo or header image upload
• customizable text areas (home page description, footer site info)
• featured slider pages
• different page templates (blog, news, login, register)
• menu management, exclude pages from navigation

They are all meant to allow you to improve and customize your website without having to touch a single line of code.

If you want to learn more about Smarter’s functionality check out the short video below, and experience the smarter way to start your online presence.

Support

If you have any question or concerns, visit the Cozmoslabs forums for help (http://cozmoslabs.com/forums/).

Related posts:

1. The new Smarter and WordPress 3.0
2. Charisma, Free Genesis Child Theme
3. Smarter Theme Teaser

The idea behind Smarter Theme is to quickly build a presentation website for small and medium size companies without the need to touch a single line of code.

We’ve put together a screencast with a quick walk-through of the theme and it’s features. I hope you find it interesting and let me know what you think so far!

Related posts:

1. The new Smarter and WordPress 3.0
2. Smarter WordPress Theme
3. Theme Teasers

Simply put I have been lazy lately. I know this isn’t the best way to sell my self but a little bit of honesty hasn’t hurt anyone (or has it? ). So without further ado I here by present you Commune Child Theme based on Thematic!

As far as I know it’s the first magazine like Thematic child theme released for free!

     

A small guide

There are basically three things to explain: adding your own logo, the Tabbed Widget and adding images to posts!

Adding your own logo

Commune features an Options page that allows you to upload your own logo or banner image. You need to go to the WordPress admin panel and under “Apperance -> Child Theme Options”.

This is how the interface looks like:

Child Theme Options Page - You now have the posibility to upload your header image from WordPress

The Tabbed Widget – update: it currently doesn’t work with WordPress 2.8

To use the functionality of the Tabbed Widget Plugin you first need to download and install it!

Once that’s out of the way select Appearance –> Tabbed Widgets. The interface gives you the possibility to create 8 Tabbed Widget areas, but in out case we’ll use just one. In Tabbed Widget No. 1 select the widgets you want displayed. For the demo of the child theme Commune I used:

• Recent Posts
• Recent Comments
• Tag Clouds
• Search

Make sure you give a title to each individual widget or your users will only see 4 tabs.

Other settings you need to take into consideration are:

• deselect show title (it’s deselected by default)
• select Style as: tabs

I’ve also uploaded an image with the settings for the Tabbed Widget Nr.1.

The next and last step is to head over to Appearance -> Widgets. Select the Primary Aside Widget, click Show and add Tabbed Widget 1 to it and save changes. After this you should have your Tabbed Widget displayed on the front-end of your blog in all it’s glory!

Category and post images

Another key element of this theme is the way pictures are used and displayed. For this the Easy Peasy Images code by Andrew Rickmann was integrated into the theme code.

What this does is to get a list of all the images attached to a post. It then finds the first image with a sort order of 0 and displays it. By default all images have a sort order of zero unless you choose to reorder them. If you don’t make any changes then it will find the first image. If you reorder them using drag and drop the first image in the list will have an order of 1 and you would need to change it to 0.

Default images by category

The theme will add a list of categories to the Media -> Library so that you can assign images to one or more categories. If the function doesn’t find a post attachment with a sort order of 0 then it will default to the image attached to the category the post is in. Note: it will use the first category image it finds.

For more information on the usage you can see a video-tutorial over at Andrew Rickmann’s web-site, www.wp-fun.co.uk

As always if you have any questions or if you find bugs please let me know! I appreciate every input!

Related posts:

1. Installing WordPress Child Themes and Customizing the Byty Theme
2. Commune Child Theme – Update
3. Early Morning Child Theme