WPFreemium- Free Premium WordPress Themes

In short: WPFreemium is a two column WordPress Theme heavily designed for multi-authored blogs.
WPFreemium features a deep integration of Gravatar images for all post authors, author profiles, and comments. Some of the primary goals for creating this theme was for it to be light weight, fast, and really highlight on the contributing authors.

Here’s a few screenshots:

  WPFreemium (669.9 KiB, 294 hits)

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Author Page:

Single Page:

Author Byline, Promotion on Single Pages:

Archives:

Here’s a quick run down of features:

• Valid xHTML Strict 1.0 / CSS
• Code is well commented for the non technical savvy
• Sidebar Widgets enabled
• Custom Front Page with 3 featuring articles
• By default - 6 advertisement spots on all pages
• Gravatars highly Supported for Comments, Author Profiles and Author Posts.
• Author Byline + Promotion on single pages
• Author Profiles feature prominent image of the author with bio, contact details and more
• Image Gallery Support
• Yes Jeffr0, a Print Stylesheet is included.
• Favicon + iPhone Webclip icon Ready
• SEO Optimized title tags and headers
• 404 Error Page notifies admin each time someone sumbles across a broken link so they can fix it.
• …and Lots of minor details

Change Log:

• 2.0 - Completely revamped the backend along with a UI face lift. Using Blueprint’s CSS framework and grid system.
• 1.3 - Bug fixed in single.php - It didn’t generate the author’s promotion section with the correct author. To fix, move “<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/addons/author-metadata.php'); ?>” on line 51 in single.php file above the loop, anywhere above line 8
• 1.2 - IE Bug prevented the logo from being displayed. To fix, just remove “h1#logo a { text-indent: -9999px; }” in header.php on line 31
• 1.1 - Typo, spelled Administrator wrong in author.php on line 25 (Adminitrator)

Recommended Plugins:

I’d recommend installing WP Limit Posts Automatically which enables you to customize the excerpts on the homepage, archives, and more.

Things to do before you install:

• Update the image with your logo.
• Change both, the favicon and iPhone webclip icon to match your brand. (Currently WordPress logos)
• Inside addons->ads->ads125×125.php: change the source to your correct advertisement page. currently its pointing to “blogdomain.com/advertise”
• I think that’s it. Upload the entire folder, “WPFreemium” in your themes directory and have fun!

Drumroll… Will there be Support?

Of course silly. BUT this is my first public theme so bare with me. I’ve tried coding for public releases making sure you guys can understand what’s going on in the backend and using best practices (always!). If you find something broken or whatever, shout me an email from the email address in _README.txt file, thanks!

Future releases:

Here are a few things I plan on adding in future versions for this theme:

• Theme Options for constant variables.
• Image uploader and cropping tool for logo and other images.
• A few aesthetics modifications
• Ad management (pt’s style)
• Fixes for unknown bugs you tell me about.
• X Feature that’ll be pretty cool.

Creating this theme was and still is a continuous process.  Anyways, I made a lot of backend changes so everything would work for the general public. A lot of things weren’t included in the first release due to time constrains with school and whatnot. So download this theme, test it, love it, hate it, whatever you do, tell me how it goes.

Now if you excuse me, I have another final to take today and it’s math. Last one to go!

OpenBook- Free Premium Wordpress Themes

Inspired by the well-known Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt, OpenBook is a free Magazine style Wordpress theme, which doesn’t require you to manually edit a file.

I first realeased this theme in January, but at this time it was only available in French. So it is the very first English version.

  OpenBook (222 KiB, 227 hits)

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OpenBook Features

Here’s what you can expect in OpenBook theme:

• Magazine-style homepage, including 2 columns and SmoothGallery for your featured posts.
• 100% Gravatar compatible.
• Custom fields to insert images on the homepage gallery, on homepage posts and in categories posts.
• Magazine-style dropdown-menu for your categories.
• Not manual editing required. After installing the theme, you’ll find an OpenBook tab under Design, where you can set up the options for the theme, including featured posts, featured category, blog logo, number of posts to display on the gallery, categories to display on the blog homepage…
• If you hate Internet Explorer 6 as I do, you’ll probably be happy: OpenBook have an option which litteraly crash IE6 if checked. If unchecked, IE6 will not crash and people who (still) use it will see your blog just as other users.
• Compatible with Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6. (OpenBook is also probably compatible with other browsers like Konqueror, I just haven’t tested it myself)
• Widget-ready sidebar
• SEO-friendly titles
• Page templates for Links and Archives
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.3 to 2.5.1

Installing OpenBook

OpenBook install is like installing any Wordpress theme: Unzip the archive, and upload the openbook22-en directory into the wp-content/themes of your Wordpress install.

Then, go to your WP administration panel, Design » Theme and select OpenBook.

Now, you should go to Design » OpenBook and fill the various fields:

• Your blog logo url
• ID of your featured category
• Number of posts to display in SmoothGallery.
• IDs of categories to display on the homepage.
• If you want to make any IE6 crash, just check the related checkbox.
• Number of posts to display on the homepage, by category

Configuring SmoothGallery

SmoothGallery is a very pretty mootools script by Jonathan Schemoul which display posts along with big images. In order to configure it, you must create a new category (In this exemple, we’ll call it featured) and report its ID to Design » OpenBook.

When you want to show a particular post in the SmoothGallery, just edit the post and check the featured category. Of course, you can add the post to other categories as well.

Now, you should define an image that will display in SmoothGallery. Juste create a custom field, give it featuredimg as key and your image url as value. Once saved, the post will be displayed in SmoothGallery.

The ideal SmoothGallery image size is 600*250 pixels. You can use different size, but the image will be cropped or will not fill all the available space.

Using custom fields to display images in posts

As I said above, it is possible to assign one or more image(s) to a post. Theses images will be displayed on the homepage, or in categories pages, depending of the custom field used.

Here’s the custom fields keys, and the place where the images will be displayed.

• featuredimg » The image will be displayed in SmoothGallery (Only if the related post is in the featured category)
• Image » The image will be displayed along with its related post, on the homepage.
• catimage » The image will be displayed in category pages. Ideal size is 125*125 pixels.