RS11 – Free WordPress Theme

Today we have a pretty cool blog/CMS theme originally designed by Rambling Soul, which I then ported to WordPress. At first glance this may look like a relatively ordinary blog theme, but it has a few interesting features which will be gone over below. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7 and above and has features such as threaded comments, but won’t work in previous versions. There are also four widgetized areas.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features…

Home Page Template

This theme comes equipped with a home page template, which works great when you don’t have a blog on your front page. It is currently visible on the “About” page on the demo site although you would probably want to set it to your homepage and have another page for blog posts.

To configure what’s displayed in the three columns, open up the “WP RS11 Options” link in your WordPress admin panel under Appearance. Then scroll down to the Home Template section and input the data for each column.

The different options for each column should be pretty self-explanatory.

• Column Heading – What’s displayed as the heading for each column.
• Column Text – A short blurb of text to be displayed below the heading.
• Column Image – The full path image you want displayed, aligned to the left. If no image is specified, no image will be displayed.
• Read More – If you want a “Read More” link, simply input the full URL to the page you want it to link to. Nothing will be displayed if not specified.

There are also two widgetized areas above and below the three columns on the home page template. This way you can insert widgets with more control on this page.

Widget Areas

As mentioned above, this theme comes equipped with four widgetized areas. There are the two mentioned above exclusive to the home page template, as well as one each on the sidebar and the 404 template.

Page Navigation

This theme is great if you have a decent number of pages. There are three different page navigation menus in this theme.

• Top Menu – This menu is at the very top of the theme to the right of the sidebar.
• Sub Menu – This menu is also located in the header, positioned directly below the top menu inside the blue background.
• Footer Menu – This menu is located in the footer, right below the copyright message.

So how do you control which pages are displayed in these menus? Go to the “WP RS11 Options” page under appearance and input the page IDs you want included in each menu.

You can also exclude the home link on both the Top Menu and Footer Menu by checking off the respective checkbox.

Conclusion

Hope you all like the theme. Thanks again to Roshan of Rambling Soul for the design. I know I’ve been doing these Rambling Soul templates in reverse order, like the Bamboo theme, but since it’s never too late to port these, and I figured some people would find them useful

Let me know what you think in the comments. Love it, hate it, I welcome all feedback! All support inquiries should go in the forums though. Thanks for reading.