Bamboo – Free WordPress Theme
Today we have a pretty cool looking blog template designed by Rambling Soul. I then took the template and ported it to WordPress (with a bit of help). This theme features an unusual vertical page navigation, visible on the left side, as well as a featured post area. There are also two widgetized areas. This theme is built for WordPress 2.7 and above, and has features such as threaded comments and pagination.
And now onto the rest of the features in more detail…
Featured Post
Similar to FreshPick, the latest stickied post will be displayed as your “Featured” post. This is visible on the main index template only. To set a featured image, simply fill out the URL of a 235×125 image in the custom write panel when you’re publishing the post.
If you don’t specify a featured image, this will be displayed as your featured image instead.
Vertical Page Navigation
There’s nothing you really have to do to configure this. It will display all of the top level pages in tabs on the left side of the theme. So just publish a top level page, and that’s it.
The reason I held of porting this for so long is I couldn’t really figure out how to output the page list with spaces in between each letter of the page name using standard WordPress functions. Eric Sizemore, a PHP/WordPress programmer, figured out another way and sent me the code to use.
Similar to Sophistigrunge theme, since the page links are pulled directly from the database there isn’t an easy way to exclude pages from the menu. The only way I can think of is to set a page you don’t want displayed as a subpage to another page. This way it won’t be displayed on the left, effectively excluding it from the page menu.
Widget Areas
There are two widgetized areas in this theme. The first titled “Left Sidebar” is displayed on all pages below the title area. The other one titled “Home Sidebar” is only visible on the main index template, and can be seen on the right side below the featured post.
Conclusion
Hope you all like the theme! This one was on my “to do list” for a while, as the template was originally released at Rambling Soul over a year ago. Thanks again to Eric and Roshan for their help with the PHP and CSS (respectively) in regards to the vertical navigation.
Let me know what you think in the comments. If you need support though, please sign up and post in the forums.
Posted in Theme Labs
