Sophistigrunge – Free WordPress Theme
Today we have a grungy theme (hence the name) designed by DemusDesign, which I then ported to WordPress. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7+ only, which means it has support for threaded comments and comment pagination. It also means it won’t work on previous versions of WordPress. It has 6 widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer. More on that, and a couple other things below.
And now onto the widgets, and other stuff…
Widgetized Areas
Like I mentioned above, this theme has six widgetized areas. Four of these are located in the sidebar, and two in the footer. The following diagram will illustrate where exactly these go.
The Top Sidebar, Middle Left Sidebar, Middle Right Sidebar, and Bottom Sidebar should be self-explanatory. The “Footer Lists” widget is designed to house at most four different lists. These can be recent posts, comments, whatever. The “Footer About” widget is designed for text, which you can use to write an about blurb about yourself.
I opted for this instead of a theme options page since with widgets you have a bit more control, unlike in previous Demus Design ported themes like Underwater and Bolshevik which have theme option pages.
Page Menu
On the theme demo you might notice each link on the top page navigation has a subtitle. This was present in the original template and wanted to integrate it into the WordPress version as well. Thanks to this article from ThemeShaper, I was able to do that.
To add the page subtitles, I also coded in a custom write panel that only appears when you’re on the Edit Page screen.
Don’t make it too long or the page list might get pushed to the next line. Unfortunately with the subnavigation code, I’m not sure an easy way to exclude pages besides using subpages, since the page list only displays top level pages.
Conclusion
Thanks again for the nice birthday wishes last week, it’s greatly appreciated.
Hope you all like the theme. Thanks again to DemusDesign for the great template. Let me know what you think in the comments, but remember to post support requests in the forums.
Posted in Theme Labs
