Cool Blue – Free WordPress Theme

Today we have another awesome free WordPress theme, which I ported from a Styleshout template. It’s more or less a pretty standard blog design with a bunch of widgetized areas (mostly in the footer), threaded comments support, and post thumbnail integration, among other things.

Let’s get into the features in more detail.

FlickrRSS Support

If you have the FlickrRSS plugin installed, you can configure it to show your various Flickr photos. This will show up in your footer (above all the normal widgets).

This plugin is optional and will not break anything if you don’t want Flickr photos to show up.

Post Thumbnail Support

Like the SongSpace theme, this theme makes use of WordPress’ built-in post-thumbnail feature.

Since post thumbnails were introduced in 2.9, you’ll need to at least WordPress 2.9 to run this theme.

Archives Template

Like other Styleshout ported themes including Jungleland and FreshPick, Cool Blue has an archive template that differs from the usual index template.

I used the same template on the search results pages too.

Social Bookmarking

On single post pages I integrated the social bookmarking section available in the original Styleshout template.

Thanks go to Jeff Star of PerishablePress for the fully valid, SEO-friendly social media links for WordPress and also to the Sociable plugin (for LinkedIn and NewsVine).

To enable the e-mail icon, you’ll need to install the WP Email plugin by Lester Chan.

Opacity Hover Effect on Social Icons

I had some feedback from a beta tester, Muhammad Haris, who suggested that the icons would look good if they were set to 80% opacity by default and 100% on hover.

While I don’t like to mess too much with ported theme code, it’s actually pretty simple if you really want to. Just add the following lines in your style.css file:

.share-box a img{
	filter:alpha(opacity=80);
	-moz-opacity:0.8;
	-khtml-opacity: 0.8;
	opacity: 0.8;
}
.share-box a:hover img{
	filter:alpha(opacity=100);
	-moz-opacity:1;
	-khtml-opacity: 1;
	opacity: 1;
}

If a browser doesn’t support the opacity feature, don’t worry about it, the images will just show up as normal. Of course you can change all the 80’s and .8’s in the first part to whatever percentage you see fit.

Threaded Comments

The original template had a threaded comments design built-in, so I integrated it with a custom callback (plus a few CSS changes).

Widgetized Stuff

The Cool Blue WordPress theme has six widgetized areas. One in the sidebar, four in the footer (for each column), and one on the 404 template.

Pictured above is the fat, fully widgetized footer included in the Cool Blue theme.

To handle the “Updates” part, I coded in a custom widget to input your feed URL, Facebook URL, Twitter URL, and E-mail subscription URL. I’d recommend you place it in the “Footer One” widget area.

Thanks to WP Engineer for the code.

No Theme Options Page

That’s right, this is a feature. Why? Because I really couldn’t think of a good reason to include one that couldn’t be better accomplished by a separate plugin. Expect a follow up (opinion) post regarding this soon.

Conclusion

The Styleshout ports are easily the most downloaded themes here, although my download counter has been busted ever since I upgraded to 2.8 so I’m not 100% sure if anyone has overtaken them. I doubt it.

Hope you all like the theme, let me know what you think in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Keep It Simple – Free WordPress Theme
2. TechJunkie – Free WordPress Theme
3. Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme

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