Renovating Wordpress

This is a showcase of blogs using my More Than Multiple Widgets theme. It’s interesting to see what people can do with the theme.

The base theme. This is used on my blog. This is the way the theme looks if you do no changes to the color scheme or font.

Joel Wideman helped me fix a few things with the theme and discovered that the color values for the theme can actually be replace with anything that goes between “background:” and “;” in the stylesheet. Values like “transparent” and “url(http://flickr.com/your_pic)” as well as a hexadecimal color value. The only issue you may run into is that the sidebar is actually a sidebar in the upper part, but in order to give the impression that the sidebar continued all the way down to the footer, the bottom part is actually a really wide border on the main content area of the page.

Check out Joel’s site, Jailed Women.

The Stock Robot

Mr. B’s Website 

Anyone else using the theme, let me know through a comment and I’ll check it out.

There’s not much to this theme on the surface. It’s pretty basic. Only a few colors. Only a few images. But when you look under the hood, there is much more.

I built it around issues I had with other Wordpress themes and great features I saw in a few. One of the features I used is allowing the theme to be customized through an extra tab in the presentation menu. Of course, now that it is done, there is much more I see that could have been done better.

I attempted to create a theme that didn’t require any manual editing of the theme’s files to customize it. Impossible but I’m stubborn. First I added six sidebars so you can use widgets in six places, two areas in the header, one in the sidebar, and three in the footer.

But you can change more than widgets in this Wordpress theme. You can change all the fonts and you can changes the colors. In fact, this is the same theme that is running on my main blog. You can also choose to activate Adsense through this tab if you want. It’s a 468×60 ad underneath the post title. And it’s colors will match the colors you choose for the theme. You can also activate ClaimID in the header. The image is a Gravatar image and can be customized with your Gravatar email address or can be shut off. The tagline can be on or off. Comments can be on or off on pages. You can also switch out the body’s background image with a url to another image or choose not to have a background image by making the field blank.

But this is still not all. The theme is also set up for Wordpress plugins you may or may not use:

• Landing Sites
• Pagenavi
• Gravatars in Comments
• Related Posts
• Math Comment Spam Protection
• Extended Live Archives

So instead of installing these plugins and then editing the theme, you can just install them and move on.

A few notes. The colors are customizable, so you can create a really ugly theme easily and the widget areas in the top are a fixed size, so you will have to limit the size of widgets there. Oh, and there is only a link to my sites on the index, so you can link to me once and not worry about losing any link juice through the rest of your site.

My next theme is going to be a magazine one. I have learned a lot from creating this one and am ready to tackle more.

More Than Multiple Widgets Wordpress Theme

Update 12/11/2007

Fixed a few minor glitches and added a link to an online color picker from the theme options pages to help you find some colors.

Update 12/12/2007

Fixed an issue with a whitespace at the end of the functions.php file. This was causing random different bugs depending on the installation for some reason. One of the bugs was a feed that is not valid. It may be the cause of some of the other bugs listed in the comments. The current version is up on the site, 1.03.

Update 12/28/2007

Fixed the IE7 float issue and the extra commas in the tag link.