Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme

Today we have an awesome free WordPress theme, originally designed by Styleshout. This theme has a number of cool features and is reminicsent of the FreshPick theme, also designed by Styleshout. There are six widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer, as well as a custom widget included with the theme. It also has threaded comments, so you’ll need at least WordPress 2.7. Other features will also be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features in more detail…

Thumbnails

This theme makes extensive use of thumbnails, so I coded in a custom write panel to insert thumbnails into your posts as an alternative to custom fields.

• Featured Image – This image is displayed next to your featured post on the main index template. It should be sized at 350×250.
• Post Image – This image is displayed above the content on your single post pages. Thanks to the TimThumb script, a resized version is also used as the image under “Recent Posts” on your homepage.

For both, make sure you use the full path of the image. The images should also be hosted on your domain, otherwise the TimThumb script may not work.

Widgets

Like I mentioned above, this theme has a whopping six widget ready areas. One in the sidebar, four in the footer, and one on the 404 template.

For the first time, I also created a custom widget for the “Follow Us” links you currently see in the footer. This will require WordPress 2.8 to work, but if you’re currently using 2.7 it shouldn’t break anything.

Simply place the “Feed links” widget in any one of the footer widget areas, and be sure to fill in the respective URLs.

Many thanks to WPengineer for the code to this, which I modified slightly.

flickrRSS

This theme has support for the FlickrRSS plugin, which you can currently see in the sidebar. Here’s a screenshot of my settings in case you’d like to set them up on your sidebar like I have them currently:

Conclusion

Hope you all like the theme. It was actually a bit easier to port than it looked, considering I had already done most of the work already with the FreshPick theme. As a lot of the markup was very similar, it was mostly just copying a lot of the functions over to the new theme.

Oh yeah, and for the first time in like 10 themes, there isn’t a theme option page included with the Jungleland theme. Sorry all you theme options lovers, but I couldn’t think of any justifiable reason to include one. If there’s something specific you’d like to change, a tiny code edit might be in order.

A special thanks to Omar Corrales who was kind enough to test out the theme for me and found a couple bugs that I missed. Sometimes it takes an extra set of eyes to find these things.

Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, but if you have any support questions please make sure to post in the forums.